Abstract Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound same but are spelled differently. Children asked spell tenses two homophonous forms; both pronounced final /t/ -d (“ik vind,” I find ) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/sh...

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER--SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that differed from the correct exemplar by a phonological...

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition. The model predicts distinct developmental trajecto...

study, taking truly independent ratings to see which verbs participants considered to be denominal or deverbal (i.e. exocentric or not). The results of this new experiment were clear. The semantic similarity (or otherwise) of verbs-incontext to ordinary irregular usage predicted the acceptability of past-tense forms. Whether or not verbs were perceived to be exocentric was irrelevant to this. I...

Lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in children aged 7 to 10 years and adults. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences supporting one (or neither) meaning of a balanced ambiguous word in a cross-modal naming paradigm. Naming latencies for context-congruent versus context-incongruent targets and judgements of the relatedness of targets to the sentence served as indices of appropriate...

Repair processing plays an important role in spoken language processing systems. This paper proposes a method for correcting Chinese repetition repairs and demonstrates the effects of repair processing in Chinese homophone disambiguation. The experimental results show that the precision rate of 93.87% and the recall rate of 90.65% can be achieved for the repair processing. At the same time, 50%...

This paper reviews our recent brain imaging studies that indicate that the left middle frontal gyrus plays a crucial role in explicit Chinese character recognition and reading. The left middle frontal gyrus seems to serve as a neural system for coordinating and integrating visuo-orthographic information with phonological and semantic elements in written Chinese, as seen in several paradigms inc...

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball), distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were...