Orthographic precision for word naming in skilled readers

Perfetti (2007) proposed that the quality of lexical representations affects reading. We investigated the role of lexical quality in decoding. Eighty-four adults read aloud words and pseudowords with dense and sparse neighbourhoods in a masked form-priming experiment. Individual-difference measures of language and cognitive processes were collected and entered into a principal component analysis (PCA). Compared to a non-overlapping control prime, we observed greater facilitatory form-priming for word targets with sparse neighbourhoods than those with dense neighbourhoods. A PCA component related to orthographic precision affected form-priming: people with low orthographic precision showed greater facilitation for words with sparse neighbourhoods, primed by pseudowords, than those with dense neighbourhoods. People with high orthographic precision demonstrated the converse, only when primed by words. For pseudoword reading, word primes facilitated more than pseudoword primes in people with low orthographic precision. People with high orthographic precision showed the opposite pattern

Age-of-Acquisition Effects: A Literature Review

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational techniques. We review the current evidence for the AoA effect stemming from a range of methodologies and paradigms and apply these findings to current explanations of how and where the AoA effect occurs. We conclude that the AoA effect can be found both in the connections between levels of representations and within these representations themselves, and that the effect itself occurs through the process of the distinct coding of early and late items, together with the nature of the connections between levels of representation. This approach strongly suggests that the AoA effect results from the construction of perceptual-semantic representations and the mappings between representation

Towards a culture of open scholarship: the role of pedagogical communities

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for evidence on the roles that different stakeholders play in reproducibility and research integrity. Of central priority are proposals for improving research integrity and quality, as well as guidance and support for researchers. In response to this, we argue that there is one important component of research integrity that is often absent from discussion: the pedagogical consequences of how we teach, mentor, and supervise students through open scholarship. We justify the need to integrate open scholarship principles into research training within higher education and argue that pedagogical communities play a key role in fostering an inclusive culture of open scholarship. We illustrate these benefits by presenting the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT), an international grassroots community whose goal is to provide support, resources, visibility, and advocacy for the adoption of principled, open teaching and mentoring practices, whilst generating conversations about the ethics and social impact of higher-education pedagogy. Representing a diverse group of early-career researchers and students across specialisms, we advocate for greater recognition of and support for pedagogical communities, and encourage all research stakeholders to engage with these communities to enable long-term, sustainable change

Creative destruction in science

Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings, but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures, conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working parents’ reasoning about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. Significance statement: It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, published research findings across scientific fields are not readily replicable when the same method is repeated. Although extremely valuable, failed replications risk leaving a theoretical void— reducing confidence the original theoretical prediction is true, but not replacing it with positive evidence in favor of an alternative theory. We introduce the creative destruction approach to replication, which combines theory pruning methods from the field of management with emerging best practices from the open science movement, with the aim of making replications as generative as possible. In effect, we advocate for a Replication 2.0 movement in which the goal shifts from checking on the reliability of past findings to actively engaging in competitive theory testing and theory building. Scientific transparency statement: The materials, code, and data for this article are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework, with links provided in the article