Letter/Word Processing

Mask wearing can alter fundamental cognitive networks for the McGurk effect

As a cognitive psychology professor, I have always loved showing students the never-failing McGurk effect in perception class. After all, who isn’t intrigued by how reliable this effect is? No matter how much you know about it and how many times you have seen or heard the stimuli before, it works. The McGurk effect is the experience […]

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A fanfare for the awesome teamwork of compound words

Compound words are funny creatures. They exist as words themselves, but also contain smaller words which have their own unique meanings.  For example, the compound word butterfly refers to the pretty insect with wings, but it also contains the smaller words butter (yellow spread made from cream) and fly (move through the air). But how […]

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Knowing a word’s position before you see it: Word order effects in reading

It is truly remarkable what the mind can achieve through the process of reading. Take for example the message below. Were you able to interpret what this message says? Our ability to ‘read’ this combination of numbers and letters highlights the fact that reading (among other things) has become a deeply embedded feature of our […]

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Drinking Beck’s rather than Heineken? Perhaps it is the result of life-long associative learning

Asking your waiter what beers are on tap should come with a trigger warning, because the simple question may trigger a cognitive challenge. From Heineken to Becks and some other local boutique IPAs whose names you cannot even pronounce, the list can be so extensive that you are put into frantic rehearsal mode just to […]

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Doubling down on consonant doubling: When sound and spelling both contribute to spelling

The spelling rules of English are by far the most challenging aspect of learning to read, of reading, and of writing. Anyone who has seen a child’s spontaneous writing has seen all kinds of creative misspellings. Adults, of course, are also not immune to spelling errors. Spelling is so strange in the English language that […]

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Sleeping on banara and the fate of banana: consolidation of new words in the lexicon

How do we recognize the written word? While this seems trivially easy to us, we need to remember that words that are quite close perceptually can be drastically different in meaning. Fin and fine, crew and crow, and deck and desk may look nearly the same but their meanings differ considerably. In the sentence “I […]

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