A large body of evidence suggests that people spontaneously and implicitly learn about regularities present in the visual input. Although theorized as critical for reading, this ability has so far been demonstrated only for non-linguistic materials. We tested whether local statistical regularities are also extracted from materials that closely resemble one’s native language. In two experiments, Italian speakers saw a set of letter strings modelled on the Italian lexicon and guessed which of these strings were words in a fictitious language and which were foils.

Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g., lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence.

This is a large-scale, multi-lab replication effort in which we assessed the original data by Flavell, Beach and Chinsky (1966) showing that older children (10yo) spontaneously verbalise during working memory tasks, contrary to younger children (5yo). The original pattern of results was largely upheld: older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task.

This work was led by Emily Elliott, Candice Morey and Angela AuBuchon, and involved 17 different labs. All data, analyses and the manuscript itself are available at the Open Science Framework.

In this paper, we ask whether children's ability to access the meaning of embedded words is modulated by morphology, and in particular by the presence of a pseudosuffix (e.g., CORN in CORNER vs. PEA in PEACE; Nation and Cocksey, 2009). We replicate N&C's results that children do access the meaning of embedded words quite early on (in 3rd grade here). We also find a morphological effect -- the effect is larger in CORNER than in PEACE -- but only in the error rates, not in response times. We take these data to suggest that there is access to semantic informaton for subword chunks early on during reading acquisition, at least when the task is semantic in nature (like it was in this experiment). Morphology seems to kick in more at the level of strategic decison making (i.e., errors) rather than in connection to the implicit information processing stream (i.e., RTs). For a similar experiment with adults, check out here.

The article is available online here https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01164-3 or as a PDF here https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/s13421-021-01164-3.pdf. The raw data and the analysis code are here.