Two experiments show that eye fixations land nearer to the beginning of misspelled than correctly spelled beginning words during sentence reading. The effect holds regardless of whether the previous word is easy (high frequency) or difficult (low frequency) to process. In Experiment 1, the misspelled words were directly fixated. In Experiment 2, a saccade contingent change technique was used su...

We present two eye-tracking experiments that investigate lexical frequency and semantic context constraints in spoken-word recognition in German. In both experiments, the pivotal words were pairs of nouns overlapping at onset but varying in lexical frequency. In Experiment 1, German listeners showed an expected frequency bias towards high-frequency competitors (e.g., Blume, 'flower') when instr...

Studies show that emerging left hemisphere lateralization for word reading is correlated with emerging left hemisphere lateralization for high spatial frequency (HSF) information. However, it is currently unclear whether left lateralization is partially caused by a pre‐ existing left hemisphere bias for high spatial frequency visual information (such as that found in words), or if the left hemi...

The sentence stimuli developed in this project combined aspects from several traditional approaches to speech audiometry. Sentences varied with respect to frequency of word use and phonetic confusability. Familiar consonant-vowel-consonant words, nouns and modifiers, were used to form 500 sentences of seven to nine syllables. Based on concepts from the Neighborhood Activation Model for spoken w...

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words prov...

The nature of the contents of academic Web sites is of direct relevance to the new field of scientific Web intelligence, and for search engine and topic-specific crawler designers. We analyze word frequencies in national academic Webs using the Web sites of three English-speaking nations: Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. Strong regularities were found in page size and word frequency distribu...

This study investigates how orthographic modifications to the stems of complex words affect morphological processing in proficient young Spanish readers and children with reading deficits. In a definition task all children, irrespective of their reading skill, were worse at defining derived words that had an orthographic alteration of the base stem than words with no orthographic alteration. In...

Previous research has demonstrated a systematic, nonlinear relationship between word frequency judgments and values from word frequency norms. This relationship could reflect a perceptual process similar to that found in the psychophysics literature for a variety of sensory phenomena. Alternatively, it could reflect memory strength differences that are expected for words of varying levels of pr...

If recognition of a polymorphemic word always takes place via its decomposition into stem and affix, then the higher the frequency of its stem (i.e., base frequency) the easier the lexical decision response should be when frequency of the word itself (i.e., surface frequency) is controlled. Past experiments have demonstrated such a base frequency effect, but not under all circumstances. Thus, a...