No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Executive Function (EF) is related to cognitive ability and includes such constructs as working memory, inhibition control, and cognitive flexibility (i.e., set shifting). The individual constructs work together to allow a person to set and achieve goals. Student success and achievement have been linked to satisfactory EF skills. Research indicates the testing methods for executive function are diverse and may lack sensitivity. Currently, the NIH Toolbox-Cognitive Battery (NTCB) assessment is a nationally normed standardized battery used to measure individual constructs of executive function in isolation. However, this assessment does not allow measurement of EF as the individual constructs interoperate. Virtual reality (VR) allows the assessment of a combination of individual constructs in real-world settings providing increased ecological validity. This study evaluated the Virtual Reality Grocery Store (VEGS) as an assessment for executive function skills to determine the existing barriers for the use of virtual reality as an assessment for executive function. Although there is a possibility of using VEGS for EF assessment, there is still much work to be done to create an ecologically valid assessment.

No description available.

The present research investigates the relationship between spoken language and reading processes by using several experimental techniques to examine the nature of the phonological representations used during silent reading. Experiments 1 through 4 measured eye movements during sentence reading and lexical decision using a parafoveal preview paradigm. In Experiment 5, brain electrical potentials were recorded in a four-field masked priming paradigm during passive reading of single words. Experiments 1 and 2 asked whether the phonological representations used by skilled readers in lexical access are minimal and contain only consonant information, or whether they include phonological vowel information as well. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 examined whether the phonological representations used in lexical access contain prosodic information about syllables as well as phoneme information. In combination, these experiments demonstrated that skilled readers are sensitive to vowel and prosody information presented in parafoveal previews and masked foveal primes. This suggests that readers routinely activate elaborate, speech-like phonological representations early in word recognition during silent reading. The phonological hub theory of silent reading is proposed to account for this finding and situate orthographic and phonological processes in the context of natural silent reading.

Compound words are morphologically complex words that are composed of two lexemes (e.g. farmhouse, blackboard). By investigating how compound words are processed, insight can be gained into the organization of the mental lexicon. Five experiments are reported which explored how English compound words are processed. In each experiment, compound words were embedded into sentences and readers' eye movements were recorded as they read these sentences. Several reading time measures were analyzed to investigate the time-course of compound word recognition. Representations of the compound words were examined by manipulating the frequency of the beginning lexeme in the compound (Experiments I1A, 1B, 3A), the frequency of the ending lexeme (Experiment 3B), or the familiarity of the whole compound word (Experiment 2). Experiments 1A and 1B demonstrated that compound word length does not consistently modulate whether beginning lexeme frequency effects are observed for English compound words. However, there are larger effects for overall compound familiarity on most reading time measures for long compound words compared to short compound words (Experiment 2). Experiments 3A and 3B manipulated the predictability of the sentence context with respect to compound words. Having a highly predictive sentence context significantly reduced early effects of beginning lexeme frequency (Experiment 3A), but not later effects of beginning lexeme frequency (Experiment 3A) or ending lexeme frequency (Experiment 3B). Also, compound words that contained a high frequency lexeme were read faster than length and frequency matched monomorphemic words. Correlations and multiple regression analyses suggested that the size of a compound word's morphological family and the number of higher frequency morphological family members significantly affect compound word reading time. The results are discussed in terms of a proposed framework for English compound word recognition where morphological representations are hierarchically organized within the lexicon.