A longitudinal study of theory of mind and listening comprehension: Is preschool theory of mind important?

Theory of mind has been shown to be important for listening comprehension for children at a range of ages. However, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence for a relationship between early theory of mind and later listening comprehension. The aim of this study was to examine whether preschool theory of mind has a longitudinal direct effect on later listening comprehension over and above the effects of concurrent theory of mind.

Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas.

We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people.

A behavioral database for masked form priming.

Reading involves a process of matching an orthographic input with stored representations in lexical memory. The masked priming paradigm has become a standard tool for investigating this process. Use of existing results from this paradigm can be limited by the precision of the data and the need for cross-experiment comparisons that lack normal experimental controls.

Letter transpositions within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries.

Recent evidence has revealed conflicting results regarding the influence of letter transpositions during the recognition of morphologically complex words. While some studies suggest that the disruption of the morpheme boundary through across-boundary transpositions (e.g.

Orthography influences the perception and production of speech.

One intriguing question in language research concerns the extent to which orthographic information impacts on spoken word processing. Previous research has faced a number of methodological difficulties and has not reached a definitive conclusion. Our research addresses these difficulties by capitalizing on recent developments in the area of word learning.

Embedded words in visual word recognition: does the left hemisphere see the rain in brain?

To examine whether interhemispheric transfer during foveal word recognition entails a discontinuity between the information presented to the left and right of fixation, we presented target words in such a way that participants fixated immediately left or right of an embedded word (as in gr*apple, bull*et) or in the middle of an embedded word (grapp*le, bu*llet). Categorization responses to target words were faster and more accurate in a congruent condition (in which the embedded word was associated with the same response; e.g.

Is morphological decomposition limited to low-frequency words?

On the basis of data from masked priming experiments, it has been argued that an automatic process of decomposition is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli, irrespective of their lexical characteristics (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). So far, this claim has been tested only with respect to low-frequency primes and nonword primes. This is a limitation because some models of morphological processing postulate that only high-frequency complex words are recognized as whole forms.