Publications from 2000

Plaut DC & Booth JR (2000). Individual and developmental differences in semantic priming: Empirical findings and computational support for a single-mechanism account of lexical processing. Psychological Review, 107, 786-823. [pdf]

Existing accounts of single-word semantic priming phenomena incorporate multiple mechanisms, such as spreading activation, expectancy-based processes, and postlexical semantic matching. The authors provide empirical and computational support for a single-mechanism distributed network account. Previous studies have found greater semantic priming for low- than for high-frequency target words as well as inhibition following unrelated primes only at long stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). A series of experiments examined the modulation of these effects by individual differences in age or perceptual ability. Third-grade, 6th-grade, and college students performed a lexical-decision task on high- and low-frequency target words preceded by related, unrelated, and nonword primes. Greater priming for low-frequency targets was exhibited only by participants with high perceptual ability. Moreover, unlike the college students, the children showed no inhibition even at the long SOA. The authors provide an account of these results in terms of the properties of distributed network models and support this account with an explicit computational simulation.

Booth JR, MacWhinney B & Harasaki Y (2000). Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences. Child Development, 4, 979-1001. [pdf]

250 children (aged 8-11 yrs) were given a word-by-word sentence task in both the visual and auditory modes. The sentences included an object relative clause, a subject relative clause, or a conjoined verb phrase. Each sentence was followed by a true-false question, testing the subject of either the 1st or 2nd verb. Ss were also given 2 memory span measures: digit span and reading span. High digit span Ss slowed down more at the transition from the main to the relative clause than did the low digit span Ss. The findings suggest the presence of a U-shaped learning pattern for on-line processing of restrictive relative clauses. Off-line accuracy scores showed different patterns for good comprehenders and poor comprehenders (PCMs). PCMs answered the 2nd verb questions at levels that were consistently below chance. Their answers were based on an incorrect local attachment strategy that treated the 2nd noun as the subject of the 2nd verb. Interestingly, low memory span PCMs used the local attachment strategy less consistently than high memory span PCMs, and all PCMs used this strategy less consistently for harder than for easier sentences.

Booth JR, Perfetti CA, MacWhinney B & Hunt SB (2000). The association of rapid temporal perception with orthographic and phonological processing in reading impaired children and adults. Scientific Studies of Reading, 4, 101-132. [pdf]

Adults and children with reading impairment (N = 67) were administered a rapid auditory task, a rapid visual task, and a battery of orthographic and phonological tasks. The results support a differential development model of reading disability that argues that deficits in rapid auditory ability in children are primarily associated with problems in phonological processing, whereas deficits in rapid visual ability in children are primarily associated with problems in orthographic processing (M. E. Farmer & R. M. Klein, 1996). In contrast to the children, the adults showed a strong relation between rapid auditory ability and both orthographic and phonological processing. These results suggest that continued deficits in auditory ability may have a pervasive and negative impact on word processing in general. In addition, adults did not exhibit a relation between rapid visual ability and orthographic-processing problems. Orthographic-processing deficits may result from a reading delay condition that can be overcome with increased reading exposure (M. W. Harm & M. S. Seidenberg, 1999).

Booth JR, MacWhinney B, Thulborn KR, Sacco K, Voyvodic J & Feldman HM (2000). Developmental and lesion effects in brain activation during sentence comprehension and mental rotation. Developmental Neuropsychology, 18, 139-169. [pdf]

Examined the development of neurocognitive networks in auditory sentence comprehension and mental rotation of alphanumeric stimuli. Brain activation patterns were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 5 adults (aged 20-28 yrs), 7 children (aged 9-12 yrs), and 6 pediatric patients (aged 9-12 yrs) with perinatal strokes or periventricular hemorrhages. Healthy children and adults activated similar neurocognitive networks, but there were developmental differences in activity distribution. In the sentence task, children showed more activation in the inferior visual area suggesting an imagery rather than linguistic strategy for sentence processing. Consistent use of a sentence comprehension strategy (correct or incorrect vs chance) was associated with greater activation in the inferior frontal area (Broca's) in children and pediatric Ss. In the mental rotation task, healthy adults showed more activation in the superior parietal and middle frontal areas and less activation in the supramarginal gyrus, suggesting adults were primarily engaged in visual-spatial manipulation and less engaged in the recognition of noncanonical views of stimuli. Pediatric Ss showed patterns of activation consistent with organization of cognitive processing into homologous areas of the contralateral hemisphere.