Presents an introductory statement to the February 2005 issue of "Language and Cognitive Processes."

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a three-consonantal root and a word-pattern (a nominal or a verbal pattern). Previous research has revealed that a parafoveal preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated first-pass reading (as indexed by first fixation duration and gaze duration). In the current study we extended our research on parafoveal preview effects to other derivational morphemes in Hebrew and also examined whether context has an influence on these early morphological effects. We found that a parafoveal preview which had a common verbal pattern with a target word facilitated processing, but a preview with a common nominal pattern did not. These results are similar to previous results obtained using the masked priming paradigm with single words, and suggest that masked priming and parafoveal preview tap similar cognitive processes in word recognition. Furthermore, a preview of a verbal form (that was syntactica

The present work aims at demonstrating that visual training associated with the act of reading modifies the way we perceive printed words. As reading does not train all parts of the retina in the same way but favors regions on the side in the direction of scanning, visual word recognition should be better at retinal locations that are frequently used during reading. In two studies that probed word and letter discriminations we provided evidence for a correlation between eye fixation pattern during reading and performance. We showed that effects of reading-related visual training were stimulus-specific in the sense that it [...]

We examined the orthographic and phonological computation of words and nonwords focusing on the pseudohomophone test in masked presentations. The priming manipulation consisted of gradually increasing or decreasing the orthographic and phonological similarity between the primes and the targets. We employed a psychophysical approach, presenting subjects with a large number of trials, while varying the parameters of exposure duration and luminance. The results suggest that phonological priming effects for brief exposure durations are robust, not fragile, and can be demonstrated for words as well as for nonwords. Moreover, the effects are not restricted to a narrow window of energy, but are revealed across a wide range of SOAs and luminance conditions. However, since the computed phonological code is initially coarse-grained, substantial phonological contrasts are required to obtain phonological effects under masked presentation.

Investigates the role of the dissociation of phonological, semantic and morphological factors in morphological priming. Priming between morphologically related words in Hebrew determined by higher level linguistic characteristics and not reduced to phonological overlap; Potential of using both masked and cross-modal priming to examine morphological processing.