Overgeneral memories are associated with a history of depression, and are produced even when a person is not currently depressed. Whether they are antecedent or scar of depression, they are linked to poor prognosis and are thought to be markers of underlying causal processes. Such processes include difficulties experienced in depression with executive function and truncated searches in remember...

In this paper, we make a fundamental distinction between literacy attainment scores and the actual process of learning to read, and examine these two aspects of reading in atypical development. Reading skills in a group of children and adults with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS) were compared to a group of typically developing children matched for reading age and receptive vocabular...

BACKGROUND Current cognitive models propose that multiple processes are involved in reading and writing. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to use linguistic analyses to clarify the cognitive dysfunction behind two classic alexic syndromes. METHODS We report four experiments on two patients, one with alexia without agraphia following occipitotemporal lesions, and one with alexia with agraphia from a le...

Previous studies have reported facilitatory effects of semantic richness on word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). These effects suggest that word meaning is an important contributor to lexical decision task (LDT) performance, but what are the effects of repeated LDT practice on these semantic contributions? The current study utilized data from the British Lexicon Project (BLP) in which 78 ...

We compared the eye-movements of two patients who read letter-by-letter (LBL) following a left occipital lobe lesion with those of normal control subjects and of hemianopic patients in two tasks: a nonreading visual search task and a text reading task. Whereas the LBL readers exhibited similar eye-movement patterns to those of the other two groups on the nonreading task, their eye movements dif...

The concrete-abstract categorization scheme has guided several research programs. A popular way to classify words into one of these categories is to calculate a word's mean value in a Concreteness or Imageability rating scale. However, this procedure has several limitations. For instance, results can be highly distorted by outliers, ascribe differences among words when none may exist, and negle...

A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory-motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting...

The recent research direction toward multimodal semantic representation would be further advanced, if we could have a machinery to collect adequate images from the Web, given a target concept. With this motivation, this paper particularly investigates into the Webimageabilities of the behavioral features (e.g. “beaver builds dams”) of a basic-level concept (beaver). The term Web-imageability de...