Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Center for Language Studies, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-65).

Dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Akron, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / "May, 2006." Title from electronic dissertation title page (viewed 09/16/2006) Advisor, Philip A. Allen; Committee members, Kevin P. Kaut, Martin D. Murphy, Raymond E. Sanders, Daniel L. Ely; Department Chair, Paul E. Levy; Dean of the College, Ronald F. Levant; Dean of the Graduate School, George R. Newkome. Includes bibliographical references.

edited by Uli H. Frauenfelder and Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler. / "Reprinted from Cognition ... volume 25 (1987)"--T.p. verso. "A Bradford book." / Includes bibliographies and index.

Research over the past decade into the psychophysics of reading has demonstrated that information extracted from text falling on the parafoveal and peripheral regions of the retina is used by the human visual system to significantly increase reading speed. Recent results provide evidence that knowledge of word frequency is brought to bear in processing parafoveal data. There is other psychological evidence indicating the type of large-scale features used by the visual system to recognize isolated characters in parafoveal vision. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a system able to recognize the most commonly occurring english words and suffixes from parafoveally available information by employing knowledge of their letter sequences and of large-scale features of lower-case characters. The Marr-Hildreth theory of edge detection provides a description of the information computed by the earliest stages of visual processing from parafoveal words. Large-scale features extracted from this description, while relatively invariant with respect to noise and font changes, are insufficient to uniquely identify most characters but are used to place each into one of several classes of similar characters. The sequence of these 'confusion classes' is found to place a strong constraint on word identity—of the 1000 most common words comprising the system's vocabulary, representing 70% of the volume of the Brown Corpus of printed English, 92% have mutually unique confusion class sequences. Word recognition is achieved by using the confusion class sequence as a key into the vocabulary, retrieving the word or words having the same sequence. Suffixes are recognized in a similar way. Results are presented demonstrating the system's ability to identify words and suffixes in text images over a range of simulated parafoveal eccentricities and in two different fonts, one with serifs and one without. Smoothing by the Marr-Hildreth operator, the simplicity and scale of the features, the size of the character classes, and the context provided by the character sequence give the system a degree of robustness. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and psychometrically equate a set of Thai monosyllabic word lists to use in the measurement of word recognition ability. A native male and female talker from Thailand, who were judged to have a standard Thai dialect, participated as talkers in digitally recording familiar Thai monosyllabic words. Twenty native Thai participants were used as subjects to determine the percentage of correct word recognition for each word at 10 intensity levels ranging from --5 to 40 dB HL in 5 dB increments. The 200 words with the highest raw scores were included in the final word lists. Four lists of 50 words each were created and eight half-lists (25 words each) were created from the four lists. A chi-square analysis was performed, revealing no statistical differences among the lists and half-lists. The monosyllabic word data were analyzed using logistic regression to calculate threshold and slope for each list and half-list.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Psychology. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 112-118. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Psychology, 1978. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 112-115. / by Rhonda B. Friedman. / Ph.D

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the semantic processing of morphologically complex words during visual word recognition. In a series of three experiments this thesis addresses (i) the role semantic transparency during compound word reading, (ii) the nature of the conceptual structure of compound words and its effect on visual word recognition, and (iii) the time-course of semantic access during the visual comprehension of derived words. Chapter 2 documents evidence that the outcome of the compound semantic transparency effect is dependent upon the amount of language experience of the reader. We report that high compound transparency inhibits less experienced readers during naturalistic reading, yet facilitates processing among relatively more experienced readers. This study is the first to demonstrate that semantic processing of compound words is driven by individual reading skill. The study reported in Chapter 3 tests the hypothesis that the conceptual representation of a compound is based on a relational structure linking the compound’s constituents. Across two lexical decision datasets, Chapter 3 reports that greater entropy (i.e., increased competition) among a set of conceptual relations associated with a compound gives rise to longer lexical decision latencies. This finding indicates that the same compound word form is associated with many potential relational meanings, and that these meanings compete for selection during visual word recognition. Chapter 4 concerns the time-course of lexical-semantic access during derived word recognition. Existing accounts of derived word recognition widely disagree about whether access to conceptual information is granted prior to morphological decomposition. We report evidence which shows that the semantics of derived words and their stems are accessed in concert with morphological sources of information. These results challenge theoretical accounts that advocate strictly serial access to (morpho-orthographic then morpho-semantic) lexical cues. Overall, the empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests that morphological processing involves rapid and concurrent access to many sources of conceptual information. These findings align with a view of complex word processing in which the cognitive system utilizes as many cues as possible in order to maximize the opportunity of obtaining the meaning of the word. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)