How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether experience reading can determine the direction and orientation of the mental timeline, independent of...

In Malayalam there are two prevailing orthographies traditional and reformed both are written as digital text using same Malayalam encoding. Today the difference between them is manifested by both spelling and typographic conventions (i.e., renderings). Traditional orthography rendering accommodates a lot more C2-conjoining ligatures, while reformed orthography would instead use nominal con...

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in the lexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc.? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic hanja and alphabetic/syllabic hangul, on a task where judgments must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Three experiments are reported...

Adults of varying reading comprehension skill learned a set of previously unknown rare English words (e.g., gloaming) in three different learning conditions in which the type of word knowledge was manipulated. The words were presented in one of three conditions: (1) orthography-to-meaning (no phonology); (2) orthography-to-phonology (no meaning); and (3) phonology-to-meaning (no orthography). F...

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the lo...

We examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High- versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, a...

The experiment reported here tests the Lexical Orthography Hypothesis, that is, the notion that the output of the lexical phonology is the most promising phonological depth for an exhaustive representation of tone by means of diacritics in the orthography of atone language. We conducted a controlled classroom experiment with 97 secondary school pupils learning written Kabiye, a Gur language of ...