Eye movements of children with and without developmental dyslexia in an alphabetic script during alphabetic and logographic tasks.

Eye movements (EM) during naming alphabetic versus logographic stimuli in children with and without developmental dyslexia (DD) were examined for each stimulus separately to identify conspicuous characteristics that influence naming performance. 40 children (group DD = 18; control group C = 22) were taught Chinese characters. EM were recorded during naming alphabetic words, pictures and Chinese characters.

On the Connection Between Language Change and Language Processing.

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, we investigated the probability of lexical extinction by the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000s) for words that existed in the first decade of the nineteenth-century (1800s) in eight data sets for five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Is learning a logographic script easier than reading an alphabetic script for German children with dyslexia?

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia in alphabetic languages (DD) is characterized by a phonological deficit. Since logographic scripts rely predominantly on visual and morphological processing, reading performance in DD can be assumed to be less impaired when reading logographic scripts.

Methods: 40 German-speaking children (18 with DD, 22 not reading-impaired-group C; 9-11 years) received Chinese lessons.

The role of information theory for compound words in Mandarin Chinese and English.

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the effects of information-theoretic measures in the word naming task.

A word or two about nonwords: Frequency, semantic neighborhood density, and orthography-to-semantics consistency effects for nonwords in the lexical decision task.

For the most part, the effects of lexical-distributional properties of words on visual word recognition are well-established. More uncertainty remains, however, about the influence of these properties on lexical processing for nonwords. The work presented here investigates the mechanisms that guide nonword processing through an analysis of lexical decision latencies for 18,547 words and 27,079 nonwords in the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012) using piecewise generalized mixed models (pamms; Bender, Groll, & Scheipl, 2018; Bender & Scheipl, 2018; Bender, Scheipl, Hartl, Day, & Küchenhoff, 2018).

Chinese lexical database (CLD) : A large-scale lexical database for simplified Mandarin Chinese.

We present the Chinese Lexical Database (CLD): a large-scale lexical database for simplified Chinese. The CLD provides a wealth of lexical information for 3913 one-character words, 34,233 two-character words, 7143 three-character words, and 3355 four-character words, and is publicly available through http://www.chineselexicaldatabase.

The Mismeasurement of Mind: Life-Span Changes in Paired-Associate-Learning Scores Reflect the "Cost" of Learning, Not Cognitive Decline.

The age-related declines observed in scores on paired-associate-learning (PAL) tests are widely taken as support for the idea that human cognitive capacities decline across the life span. In a computational simulation, we showed that the patterns of change in PAL scores are actually predicted by the models that formalize the associative learning process in other areas of behavioral and neuroscientific research. These models also predict that manipulating language exposure can reproduce the experience-related performance differences erroneously attributed to age-related decline in age-matched adults.