Psycholinguistic Investigations of Brand Names via Word Recognition and Memory Experiments

Most research investigating brand names is aimed at understanding consumer-purchasing behaviours. Although there are a number of studies on brand names within the fields of marketing and advertising, there are relatively few within the field of psycholinguistics. Consequently, there is little knowledge about brand name representation, including how these representations become components of language. The psycholinguistic findings of the five experiments in this study are as follows: brand names have a lexicalized status, ambiguous brand names have a reaction time advantage over nonambiguous brand names, pronounceable nonwords benefit from high orthographic neighbourhoods of real English words, repeated exposure to nonwords does not necessarily improve memory based on orthography, and the addition of semantic content offers very little effect in improving memory for novel brand names (i.e., novel nonwords). This information forms the basis for the Stratified Brand Name Hypothesis, which will provide a springboard for further investigations of linguistic properties of brand names

The influence of instructional approach on the reading strategies of beginning readers

There are a number of models of reading development which propose that reading develops in a set sequence of stages (e.g. Frith 1985, Marsh et al 1981), and that each child must pass through one stage before it can move onto the next. It is been pointed out that these models very rarely take into account external factors such as the method of instruction that the children receive (Stuart and Coltheart 1988, Goswami and Bryant 1990) and what effect such factors would have on progression through the stages. This study investigated how the factor of instruction influenced how children read. Young children taught by two different methods were studied. Scottish five and six year olds taught by a phonics method, where they were shown the correspondences between letter segments and their sounds, were compared with New Zealand children of the same age taught by a language experience approach. Samples were matched for reading age, chronological age, time at school, vocabulary knowledge and digit span. Error analyses of responses to single words showed a marked divergence in reading strategies. The Scottish children were much more likely to attempt to read unfamiliar words, whereas the New Zealand children often failed to attempt to read items they did not know. The errors the Scottish children made were also qualitatively different to those of the New Zealand children. The Scottish children were better at pronouncing nonwords and were more advanced in spelling performance. The Scottish children were also superior at a test of simple phonological segmentation. They also produced a word length effect when reading words. The New Zealanders, however, were better at pronouncing irregular words and were faster readers, especially with familiar classroom words. They did not produce a word length effect even when words were distorted. Overall the Scottish children showed more evidence of a grapheme to phoneme conversion strategy, which in turn was correlated with good reading performance. The New Zealanders displayed signs of a more visual approach to reading. There was some overlap between the national groups particularly regarding the prevalence of errors incorporating beginning and end letters. The older children in each national group also showed a greater convergence of strategy use than the younger readers. This work therefore has implications for the efficacy models of reading, such as Frith's (1985). Matched groups of children should display the same reading strategies if reading skill is accomplished in universal stages, in this study they do not. Future models of reading development will need to take into consideration how the child is taught to read

Acquired dyslexia in Japanese : implications for reading theory

Acquired dyslexia research has been conducted mainly on English neurological patients. A limited number of dyslexia studies on non-alphabetic orthographies are available. Classical case studies for acquired dyslexia in Japanese, which has two distinctive scripts (morphographic Kanji and phonographic Kana), reported 'script-dependent' dyslexia patterns. Although recent case studies showed 'script-independent' dyslexia patterns for surface and phonological dyslexia, a 'script-independent' deep dyslexia pattern in Japanese has not yet been reported. This study examined four Japanese aphasic patients, using psycholinguistically well-manipulated reading stimuli for both Kanji and Kana strings. YT, with phonological impairment, demonstrated the same effects of psycholinguistic variables as observed in English deep dyslexia, but semantic errors rarely occurred in Kana word reading. YT's concomitant deep dyslexia for Kanji, and phonological dyslexia for Kana fit the phonological impairment hypothesis, and this can be treated as a unique characteristic of Japanese deep dyslexia. HW, with semantic impairment, demonstrated a 'script-independent' surface dyslexia pattern. SO, with severe semantic impairment, demonstrated a surface dyslexia pattern in Kanji word reading, but showed substantial difficulty with Kanji nonword reading. ME, with phonological impairment and a visuo-spatial deficit, showed both lexicality and length effects on reading aloud Kana strings, thus suggesting phonological dyslexia for Kana. That is, the double dissociation between Kanji and Kana nonword reading was observed in SO and ME. These results suggest that Japanese acquired dyslexia patterns are not dependent on script-type, but are also not totally independent of script-type. These outcomes of this study are discussed in terms of universality and orthographic-specificity in acquired dyslexia. Moreover, possible workings of the Japanese version of the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the triangle model Plaut, et al., 1996; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) are presented in order to explain acquired dyslexia patterns in Japanese.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Acquired Dyslexia in Japanese: Implications for Reading Theory

Acquired dyslexia research has been conducted mainly on English neurological patients. A limited number of dyslexia studies on non-alphabetic orthographies are available. Classical case studies for acquired dyslexia in Japanese, which has two distinctive scripts (morphographic Kanji and phonographic Kana), reported 'script-dependent' dyslexia patterns. Although recent case studies showed 'script-independent' dyslexia patterns for surface and phonological dyslexia, a 'script-independent' deep dyslexia pattern in Japanese has not yet been reported. This study examined four Japanese aphasic patients, using psycholinguistically well-manipulated reading stimuli for both Kanji and Kana strings. YT, with phonological impairment, demonstrated the same effects of psycholinguistic variables as observed in English deep dyslexia, but semantic errors rarely occurred in Kana word reading. YT's concomitant deep dyslexia for Kanji, and phonological dyslexia for Kana fit the phonological impairment hypothesis, and this can be treated as a unique characteristic of Japanese deep dyslexia. HW, with semantic impairment, demonstrated a 'script-independent' surface dyslexia pattern. SO, with severe semantic impairment, demonstrated a surface dyslexia pattern in Kanji word reading, but showed substantial difficulty with Kanji nonword reading. ME, with phonological impairment and a visuo-spatial deficit, showed both lexicality and length effects on reading aloud Kana strings, thus suggesting phonological dyslexia for Kana. That is, the double dissociation between Kanji and Kana nonword reading was observed in SO and ME. These results suggest that Japanese acquired dyslexia patterns are not dependent on script-type, but are also not totally independent of script-type. These outcomes of this study are discussed in terms of universality and orthographic-specificity in acquired dyslexia. Moreover, possible workings of the Japanese version of the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the triangle model Plaut, et al., 1996; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) are presented in order to explain acquired dyslexia patterns in Japanese

Word Superiority Effects in Dyslexics

Distorting the word superiority effect with intraword spacing was used to investigate the processing difference in single-word reading for dyslexics and controls. Perfetti’s Reading model suggests that dyslexics would have reduced processing capacity with intraword spacing. Results from a Covid-modified experimental protocol generally did not support the hypothesis. There was poor differentiation between groups in the word capacity coefficient. Response time by itself was also not informative. However, dyslexics had reduced accuracy in distractor identification across intraword spacings due to the lack of retention in phonological working memory or attention in central executive deficit (Alt, Fox, Levy, et al., 2022; Gray, Green, Alt, et al., 2017) as matching targets was not an issue, only confirmation of an update was problematic. In target identification, early responses and later responses were predictive of WIAT III Pseudoword (phonetic processing) and WAIS-IV Symbol Search (visuospatial matching task). These preliminary results motivate further research regarding word processing differences in dyslexic and controls