Joshua Snell

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

A sentence superiority effect was investigated using post-cued word-in-sequence identification with the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) of four horizontally aligned words. The four words were presented for 200 ms followed by a post-mask and cue for partial report. They could form a grammatically correct sentence or were formed of the same...

Decades of reading research have led to sophisticated accounts of single-word recognition and, in parallel, accounts of eye-movement control in text reading. Although these two endeavors have strongly advanced the field, their relative independence has precluded an integrated account of the reading process. To bridge the gap, we here present a comp...

In the present article, we investigate a largely unstudied cognitive process: word position coding. The question of how readers perceive word order is not trivial: Recent research has suggested that readers associate activated word representations with plausible locations in a sentence-level representation. Rather than simply being dictated by the...

Reading research has long endorsed the view that words are processed strictly one by one. The primary empirical test of this notion is the search for effects from upcoming words on readers’ eye movements during sentence reading. Here we argue that no conclusions can be drawn from the absence of such effects, and that the serial versus parallel proc...

Anyone recounting the history of cognitive psychology will have to make early mention of the study of orthographic processing (starting in 1886 with the seminal work of Cattell, a doctoral student of Wilhelm Wundt); and anyone recounting the study of orthographic processing will have to make mention of Jonathan Grainger. An honorary member and form...

Children learn about art by actively engaging with their surroundings. This makes museums potentially rich environments for learning and development. Yet, the descriptions of paintings on show are usually written for adults rather than younger visitors. This study uses mobile eye tracking to examine how painting descriptions tailored for children i...

Although word predictability is commonly considered an important factor in reading, sophisticated accounts of predictability in theories of reading are lacking. Computational models of reading traditionally use cloze norming as a proxy of word predictability, but what cloze norms precisely capture remains unclear. This study investigates whether la...

Research into reading has benefitted from the emergence of powerful computational models that account for reading behavior at different levels. Such models become more powerful when the underlying anatomy, architecture or ‘physiology’ can be linked to the behavior of interest. OB1-reader is a reading model that simulates the processes underlying re...

Orthographic processing is an open problem. Decades of visual word recognition research have fueled the development of various theoretical frameworks. Although these frameworks have had good explanatory power, various recent results cannot be satisfactorily captured in any model. In order to account for old and new phenomena alike, here I present a...

Recent research has shown that readers may to fail notice word transpositions during reading (e.g., the transposition of “fail” and “to” in this sentence). Although this transposed word (TW) phenomenon was initially taken as evidence that readers process multiple words in parallel, several studies now show that TW-effects may also occur when words...

It is assumed by the OB1-reader model that activated words are flexibly associated with spatial locations. Supporting this notion, recent studies show that readers can confuse the order of words. As word position coding is assumed to rely, among other things, on low-level visual cues, OB1 predicts that it must be harder to determine the order of wo...

Most models of word recognition assume that a letter’s identity and position are conjointly encoded. This means that in words with repeated letters (e.g. “radar”), each instance of the same letter is coded as a separate object. Here we tested an alternative scenario, according to which the brain employs configurational representations (e.g. recogni...

During reading, the brain is confronted with many relevant objects at once. But does lexical processing occur for multiple words simultaneously? Cognitive science has yet to answer this prominent question. Recently it has been argued that the issue warrants supplementing the field's traditional toolbox (response times, eye-tracking) with neuroscien...

Loss of sharp foveal vision, as is inherent to Macular Degeneration (MD), severely impacts reading. One strategy for preserving patients’ reading ability involves a one-by-one serial visual presentation (SVP) of words, whereby words are viewed extrafoveally. However, the method is limited as patients often retain the natural tendency to foveate wor...

The notion that the brain achieves visual word recognition by encoding the relative positions of letters with open-bigram representations (e.g., ‘ h-e ’, ‘ h-r ’ and ‘ e-r ’ driving recognition of ‘ her ’) has been successful in accounting for many behaviors and phenomena. However, one characteristic of open-bigrams has remained unexplored: How is...

All banknotes have security features which are intended to help determine whether they are false or genuine. Typically , however, the general public has limited knowledge of where on a banknote these security features can be found. Here, we tested whether counterfeit detection can be improved with the help of salient elements, designed to guide bot...

Abstract Central banks incorporate various security features in their banknotes to enable themselves, the general public, retailers and professional cash handlers to detect counterfeits. In two field experiments, we tested central bank counterfeit experts and non-experts (the general public) in their ability to detect counterfeited euro banknotes....

A common notion is that during the first stages of learning to read, attention is narrowly focused so as to encompass only a single or a few letters. In skilled adult readers, however, attention extends beyond single words. The latter is evidenced by faster recognition of words that have many letters in common with surrounding words, along with cor...

Does the processing of words with a transparent morphological structure benefit from this structure? Here we show that the flankers task provides an interesting novel angle on this well-researched issue. Participants saw transparent suffixed target words flanked by their stem (e.g. farm farmer farm), as well as pseudo-suffixed words and non-suffixe...

A wealth of research attests to the key role of statistical learning in the acquisition and execution of skilled reading. Little is known, however, about how regularities impact the way readers navigate through their linguistic environment. While previous studies have mostly gauged the recognition of single words, oculomotor processes are likely in...

When reading, orthographic information is extracted not only from the word the reader is looking at, but also from adjacent words in the parafovea. Here we examined, using the recently introduced OB1‐reader computational model, how orthographic information can be processed in parallel across multiple words and how orthographic information can be in...

During reading, the recognition of words is influenced by the syntactic compatibility of surrounding words: a sentence-superiority effect. However, when the goal is to make syntactic categorization decisions about single target words, these decisions are influenced by the syntactic congruency rather than compatibility of surrounding words. Although...

Central banks incorporate various security features in their banknotes to enable the general public, retailers, professional cash handlers and central banks to detect counterfeits. In this study we conducted two field experiments to test the extent to which euro banknotes can be authenticated as a function of exposure time and perceptual modality....

Are syntactic representations shared across languages, and how might that inform the nature of syntactic computations? To investigate these issues, we presented French-English bilinguals with mixed-language word sequences for 200 ms and asked them to report the identity of one word at a post-cued location. The words either formed an interpretable g...

Single words are easier to identify in a briefly presented syntactically correct word sequence compared with a scrambled version of the same set of words: a sentence superiority effect. Interactive-activation models of sentence comprehension can account for this phenomenon by implementing parallel processing of word identities. The cascaded and int...

In response to our recent claim that Readers are Parallel Processors (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.04.006), two excellent commentary letters were written by respectively Schotter & Payne, and White, Boynton & Yeatman. This is our rebuttal, wherein we emphasize that the serial-versus-parallel debate is not about whether or not words are cons...

Prior research has shown that readers may misread words by switching letters across words (e.g., the word sand in sand lane being recognized as land). These so-called letter migration errors have been observed using a divided attention paradigm whereby two words are briefly presented simultaneously, and one is postcued for identification. Letter mi...

During reading, word recognition speed is influenced by the amount of orthographic overlap with surrounding words. The nature of this phenomenon is not understood: some theories attribute it to low-level visual operations (i.e., parafoveal feature detectors influencing foveal letter detectors), whereas other theories assume that orthographic proces...

The present study examined the relative contribution of bottom-up word identification and top-down sentence-level constraints in facilitating the reading of text printed without between-word spacing. We compared reading of grammatically correct sentences and shuffled versions of the same words presented both with normal spacing and without spaces....

Prior research points to efficient identification of embedded words as a key factor in facilitating the reading of text printed without spacing between words. Here we further tested the primary role of bottom-up word identification by altering this process with a letter transposition manipulation. In two experiments, we examined silent reading and...

We report a novel transposed-word effect in speeded grammaticality judgments made about five-word sequences. The critical ungrammatical test sequences were formed by transposing two adjacent words from either a grammatical base sequence (e.g., "The white cat was big" became "The white was cat big") or an ungrammatical base sequence (e.g., "The whit...

A surprisingly small portion of reading research has been dedicated to investigating how the visual word recognition process is influenced by embedded words (e.g., ‘arm’ in ‘charm’), and no research has yet investigated embedded words in a natural reading setting. Covering this issue, the present work reports analyses of eye-tracking data from the...

Reading research is exhibiting growing interest in employing variants of the flanker paradigm to address several questions about reading. The paradigm is particularly suited for investigating parallel word processing, parafoveal-on-foveal influences, and visuospatial attention in a simple but constrained setting. However, this methodological deviat...

There are roughly two lines of theory to account for recent evidence that word processing is influenced by adjacent orthographic information. One line assumes that multiple words can be processed simultaneously through a parallel graded distribution of visuo-spatial attention. The other line assumes that attention is strictly directed to single wor...

The masked-priming lexical decision task has been the paradigm of choice for investigating how readers code for letter identity and position. Insight into the temporal integration of information between prime and target words has pointed out, among other things, that readers do not code for the absolute position of letters. This conception has spur...

Research has suggested that the word recognition process is influenced by the integration of orthographic information across words. The precise nature of this integration process may vary, however, depending on whether words are in temporal or spatial proximity. Here we present a lexical decision experiment, designed to compare temporal and spatial...

Research has suggested that the word recognition process is influenced by the integration of orthographic information across words. The precise nature of this integration process may vary, however, depending on whether words are in temporal or spatial proximity. Here we present a lexical decision experiment, designed to compare temporal and spatial...

[Free e-prints: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Kmz76ztU55xtVPutM9QB/full ] Previous research has failed to establish semantic parafoveal-on-foveal effects during reading. As an explanation, we theorise that sentence reading engages a sentence-level representation that prevents semantic parafoveal-foveal integration. Putting this account to the...

According to some bilingual language comprehension models (e.g., BIA), language membership information has a direct influence on word processing. However, this idea is not shared by all models (e.g., BIA+). To investigate this matter, we manipulated the language membership of irrelevant flanking words while French–English bilinguals performed a lex...

A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found...

Prior research has shown that processing of a given target word is facilitated by the simultaneous presentation of orthographically related stimuli in the parafovea. Here we investigate the nature of such spatial integration processes by presenting orthographic neighbors of target words in the parafovea, considering that neighbors have been shown t...