Sally Andrews

Lexical Precision in Skilled Readers: Individual Differences in Masked Neighbor Priming.

Two experiments investigated the relationship between masked form priming and individual differences in reading and spelling proficiency among university students. Experiment 1 assessed neighbor priming for 4-letter word targets from high- and low-density neighborhoods in 97 university students. The overall results replicated previous evidence of facilitatory neighborhood priming only for low-neighborhood words. However, analyses including measures of reading and spelling proficiency as covariates revealed that better spellers showed inhibitory priming for high-neighborhood words, while poorer spellers showed facilitatory priming. Experiment 2, with 123 participants, replicated the finding of stronger inhibitory neighbor priming in better spellers using 5-letter words and distinguished facilitatory and inhibitory components of priming by comparing neighbor primes with ambiguous and unambiguous partial-word primes (e.g., crow#, cr#wd, crown CROWD). The results indicate that spelling ability is selectively associated with inhibitory effects of lexical competition. The implications for theories of visual word recognition and the lexical quality hypothesis of reading skill are discussed.

Not All Skilled Readers Have Cracked the Code: Individual Differences in Masked Form Priming.

This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime lexicality were directly compared for both transposed-letter (TL) primes (e.g., sung SNUG; salb SLAB) and neighbor primes (e.g., snag SNUG; sleb SLAB) in a sample of 100 university students assessed on measures of reading, spelling and vocabulary. The data for the whole sample showed facilitation from nonword primes, but inhibition from word primes. Linear mixed models including the individual difference measures showed that higher scores on a principal component that captured the shared variance among reading, spelling, and vocabulary were associated with both stronger inhibition from TL word primes and stronger facilitation from neighbor nonword primes. These findings are consistent with the lexical quality hypothesis of reading that predicts that skilled readers vary in the extent to which they have developed precisely specified orthographic representations.

To transform or not to transform: using generalized linear mixed models to analyse reaction time data

Linear mixed-effect models (LMMs) are being increasingly widely used in psychology to analyse multi-level research designs. This feature allows LMMs to address some of the problems identified by Speelman and McGann (2013) about the use of mean data, because they do not average across individual responses. However, recent guidelines for using LMM to analyse skewed reaction time (RT) data collected in many cognitive psychological studies recommend the application of non-linear transformations to satisfy assumptions of normality. Uncritical adoption of this recommendation has important theoretical implications which can yield misleading conclusions. For example, Balota et al. (2013) showed that analyses of raw RT produced additive effects of word frequency and stimulus quality on word identification, which conflicted with the interactive effects observed in analyses of transformed RT. Generalized linear mixed-effect models (GLMM) provide a solution to this problem by satisfying normality assumptions without the need for transformation. This allows differences between individuals to be properly assessed, using the metric most appropriate to the researchers theoretical context. We outline the major theoretical decisions involved in specifying a GLMM, and illustrate them by reanalysing Balota et al.s datasets. We then consider the broader benefits of using GLMM to investigate individual differences.

Lexical quality and eye movements: Individual differences in the perceptual span of skilled adult readers

Two experiments used the gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm to investigate whether reading comprehension and spelling ability modulate the perceptual span of skilled adult readers during sentence reading. Highly proficient reading and spelling were both associated with increased use information to the right of fixation, but did not systematically modulate the extraction of information to the left of fixation. Individuals who were high in both reading and spelling ability showed the greatest benefit from window sizes larger than 11 characters, primarily because of increases in forward saccade length. They were also significantly more disrupted by being denied close parafoveal information than those poor in reading and/or spelling. These results suggest that, in addition to supporting rapid lexical retrieval of fixated words, the high quality lexical representations indexed by the combination of high reading and spelling ability support efficient processing of parafoveal information and effective saccadic targeting.

Lexical Quality and Reading Skill: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Contributions to Sentence Processing

This research investigated whether spelling ability, an index of precise lexical representations, predicts the balance between bottom-up and top-down processing in online sentence processing among skilled readers, over and above contributions of reading ability, vocabulary, and working memory. The results showed that the combination of superior reading and spelling was associated with more accurate report of rapidly presented sentences and that spelling uniquely predicted reduced reliance on context to identify words. These findings support the lexical quality hypothesis by demonstrating that individual differences in the reading strategies used by skilled readers reflect differences in the precision of their lexical representations.

Visual Abilities in older Adults Explain Age-Differences in Stroop and Fluid Intellegence but Not Face Recognition: Implications for the Vision-Cognition Connection

The associations among age, visual abilities and cognitive abilities were investigated using structural equation modeling. Measures of Visual Acuity, Colour Vision, Contrast Sensitivity, Stroop, Face Recognition and Fluid intelligence (Gf) were administered to a volunteer sample (n = 90) aged 60-87. Visual Acuity was associated with Gf even after controlling for chronological age. Age differences in Stroop were explained entirely by Colour Vision performance. However, neither Visual Acuity nor Colour Vision explained age-differences in Face Recognition. The results show that performance on some neuropsychological tests is influenced by visual ability and challenge the conventional identification of ageing effects on the Stroop task with deficits in frontal executive functioning. Visual abilities do not, however, contribute to age-differences in all cognitive domains suggesting that sensory and cognitive performance declines are not necessarily due to common biological ageing processes.

Between- and Within-Individual Effects of Visual Contrast Sensitivity on Perceptual Matching, Processing Speed, and Associative Memory in Older Adults

Background: Although cross-sectional studies have demonstrated associations between visual contrast sensitivity and cognitive test performance, it remains unclear whether peripheral visual or perceptual factors explain the association. Objective: We aimed at determining whether reducing static contrast of the study stimuli would simulate the performance deficits on measures of processing speed and associative memory that are associated with aging. Methods: We investigated the mechanism by which vision and memory are associated in a sample of 91 volunteers aged 60–87 years. In tests of perceptual matching, digit-symbol matching, and associative memory, the level of static contrast of the stimuli was manipulated, with three contrast levels. The duration of stimuli presentation was also manipulated in the associative memory task in a full-factorial experimental design. Accuracy and response latencies (for correct trials) were measured. Results: Experimental results showed that within subjects, lower contrast was associated with longer latencies, indicating an effect on information processing speed. Regression analyses replicated previous findings of a moderate to strong association between visual contrast sensitivity and cognitive performance in cross-sectional studies. Conclusion: These results provide support for a theory in which visual aging is associated with slower encoding of information as well as being involved at a more central level.

Parafoveal Lexical Activation Depends on Skilled Reading Proficiency.

The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., sped), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor (seed), a nonword neighbor (sted), or an all-letter-different nonword (glat). Ninety-four skilled adult readers were assessed on measures of reading and spelling ability. The results showed that null effects of preview lexical status in the average data obscured systematic differences on the basis of proficiency and target neighborhood density. For targets from dense neighborhoods, inhibition from a higher frequency neighbor preview occurred among highly proficient readers, and particularly those with superior spelling ability, in early fixation measures. Poorer readers showed inhibition only in second-pass reading of the target. These data suggest that readers with precise lexical representations are more likely to extract lexical information from a word before it is fixated. The implications for computational models of eye movements in reading are discussed.

Lexical Expertise and Reading Skill

Abstract This chapter overviews a research program assessing the lexical expertise hypothesis of reading skill which assumes that the critical, specific determinant of written language proficiency is an “expert lexicon” characterized by precise, redundant, lexical representations that support efficient, autonomous, lexical retrieval (Perfetti, 1992). Evidence for the precision and redundancy of skilled readers’ lexical representations is provided by investigations of the masked priming and rhyme judgment performance of university student readers categorized on reading comprehension and spelling performance. Lexical experts, defined by the combination of good reading and good spelling, were more efficient at lexical classification and more sensitive to orthographic–phonological relationships, but less susceptible to priming and interference from orthographically similar stimuli. Further experiments used rapid serial visual presentation sentence paradigms to investigate functional autonomy of skilled readers’ lexical retrieval. Better readers were more efficient at selecting the sentence-congruent meaning of a homographic word in a probe memory task but less susceptible to biasing sentence context when the task required accurate identification of sentence-incongruent words and nonwords. These findings support the view that better readers’ higher quality lexical representations allow them to more effectively integrate bottom–up and top–down information and tailor their processing to task demands.

Masked translation priming asymmetry in Chinese- English bilinguals: Making sense of the Sense Model

Masked translation priming asymmetry is the robust finding that priming from a bilinguals first language (L1) to their second language (L2) is stronger than priming from L2 to L1. This asymmetry has been claimed to be task dependent. The Sense Model proposed by Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol, and Nakamura (2004) claims that the asymmetry is reduced in semantic categorization relative to lexical decision due to a category filtering mechanism that limits the features considered in categorization decisions to dominant, category-relevant features. This paper reports two pairs of semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks designed to test the Sense Models predictions. The experiments replicated the finding of Finkbeiner et al. that L2-L1 priming is somewhat stronger in semantic categorization than lexical decision, selectively for exemplars of the category. However, the direct comparison of L2-L1 and L1-L2 translation priming across tasks failed to confirm the Sense Models central prediction that translation priming asymmetry is significantly reduced in semantic categorization. The data therefore fail to support the category filtering account of translation priming asymmetry. Rather, they suggest that pre-activation of conceptual features of the target category provides feedback to lexical forms that compensates for the weak connections between the lexical and conceptual representations of L2 words.