A promising new tool for literacy instruction: The morphological matrix.

There is growing interest in the role that morphological knowledge plays in literacy acquisition, but there is no research directly comparing the efficacy of different forms of morphological instruction. Here we compare two methods of teaching English morphology in the context of a memory experiment when words were organized by affix during study (e.g., a list of words was presented that all share an affix, such as , , , , etc.) or by base during study (e.g., a list of words was presented that all share a base, such as , , , ). We show that memory for morphologically complex words is better in both conditions compared to a control condition that does not highlight the morphological composition of words, and most importantly, show that studying words in a base-centric format improves memory further still. We argue that the morphological matrix that organizes words around a common base may provide an important new tool for literacy instruction.

How We Think about Temporal Words: A Gestural Priming Study in English and Chinese.

Spatial metaphors are used to represent and reason about time. Such metaphors are typically arranged along the sagittal axis in most languages. For example, in English, "The future lies ahead of us" and "We look back on our past." This is less straightforward for Chinese. Specifically, both the past and future can either be behind or ahead. The present study aims to explore these cross-linguistic differences by priming auditory targets (e.g., tomorrow) with either a congruent (i.e., pointing forwards) or incongruent (i.e., pointing backwards) gesture. Two groups of college-age young adult participants (English and Chinese speakers) made temporal classifications of words after watching a gestural prime. If speakers represent time along the sagittal axis, they should respond faster if the auditory target is preceded with a gesture indicating a congruent vs. incongruent spatial location. Results showed that English speakers responded faster to congruent gesture-word pairs than to incongruent pairs, mirroring spatio-temporal metaphors commonly recruited to talk about time in their native language. However, such an effect of congruency was not found for Chinese speakers. These findings suggest that while the spatio-temporal metaphors commonly recruited to talk about time help to structure the mental timelines of English speakers, the varying instances in how time is represented along the sagittal axis in Chinese may lead to a more variable mental timeline as well. In addition, our findings demonstrate that gestures may not only be a means of accessing concrete concepts in the mind, as shown in previous studies, but may be used to access abstract ones as well.

Semantic Richness Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: A Lexical Decision and Semantic Categorization Megastudy.

A large number of studies have demonstrated that semantic richness dimensions [e.g., number of features, semantic neighborhood density, semantic diversity , concreteness, emotional valence] influence word recognition processes. Some of these richness effects appear to be task-general, while others have been found to vary across tasks. Importantly, almost all of these findings have been found in the visual word recognition literature. To address this gap, we examined the extent to which these semantic richness effects are also found in spoken word recognition, using a megastudy approach that allows for an examination of the relative contribution of the various semantic properties to performance in two tasks: lexical decision, and semantic categorization. The results show that concreteness, valence, and number of features accounted for unique variance in latencies across both tasks in a similar direction-faster responses for spoken words that were concrete, emotionally valenced, and with a high number of features-while arousal, semantic neighborhood density, and semantic diversity did not influence latencies. Implications for spoken word recognition processes are discussed.