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Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons™

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Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literature

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Full-Text Articles in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

Does Heightened Perceptual Encoding In Blind Individuals Extend To Word Learning?, Lindsay N. Harris, Marissa Renee Bamberger Jan 2024

Does Heightened Perceptual Encoding In Blind Individuals Extend To Word Learning?, Lindsay N. Harris, Marissa Renee Bamberger

CISLL Publications

Past research reported blind participants tend to encode sensory details of encounters with stimuli they will later recall or recollect, whereas sighted individuals tend to abstract meaning from sensory information when encoding memories. Here we ask whether blind individuals’ use of perceptual in addition to semantic encoding extends to a task—word learning—whose purpose amounts to semantically encoding the word and definition. After studying the definitions of spoken or written words, blind braille readers (n = 23) and sighted print readers (n = 20) re-encountered each word and indicated whether it was previously presented in the same modality. Analyses …

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Phonological Decoding Skill In Braille Readers: Implications For Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Luis E. Lopez, Ailing Li, Alecia Santuzzi Jan 2023

Phonological Decoding Skill In Braille Readers: Implications For Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Luis E. Lopez, Ailing Li, Alecia Santuzzi

CISLL Publications

Highly developed phonological decoding ability is essential for leveraging the phonological decoding self-teaching loop to efficiently build a reading lexicon. In the present study we compared the phonological decoding abilities of blind braille-reading (n = 29) and sighted print-reading (n = 22) adults to investigate the possibility that braille’s complexity reduces instances of successful decoding and self-teaching. Such a disturbance of the learning loop would amplify any underlying cognitive deficits in braille readers and contribute to the high rates of learning disability diagnosis observed in blind children. Contrary to expectations, we found that braille readers had a higher …

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Bypass Language En Route To Meaning At Your Peril, Lindsay N. Harris, Charles A. Perfetti, Elizabeth Hirshorn Jan 2023

Bypass Language En Route To Meaning At Your Peril, Lindsay N. Harris, Charles A. Perfetti, Elizabeth Hirshorn

CISLL Publications

The learning account of the puzzle of ideography cannot be dismissed as readily as Morin maintains, and is compatible with the standardization account. The reading difficulties of deaf and dyslexic individuals, who cannot easily form connections between written letter strings and spoken words, suggest limits to our ability to bypass speech and reliably access meaning directly from graphic symbols.

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The Role Of Word Knowledge In Error Detection: A Challenge To The Broken-Error-Monitor Account Of Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Benjamin Creed, Charles A. Perfetti, Benjamin Rickles Jan 2022

The Role Of Word Knowledge In Error Detection: A Challenge To The Broken-Error-Monitor Account Of Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Benjamin Creed, Charles A. Perfetti, Benjamin Rickles

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)—the neural response to errors—than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error-detection mechanism that interferes with orthographic learning and text comprehension. An alternative possibility is that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is primarily a downstream effect of low-quality lexical representations—that is, poor word knowledge. On this view the attenuated ERN in dyslexics is a byproduct, rather than a source, of underdeveloped orthographic knowledge. Because the second view implies a …

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The Relationship Between Artificial And Second Language Learning, Marc Ettlinger, Kara Morgan-Short, Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg, Patrick C.M. Wong Jan 2016

The Relationship Between Artificial And Second Language Learning, Marc Ettlinger, Kara Morgan-Short, Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg, Patrick C.M. Wong

CISLL Publications

Artificial language learning (ALL) experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different …

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