Mark S. Seidenberg

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Psychology

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. These cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the reader’s processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman and Siok in J...

Computational modeling is a powerful tool for studying reading and other complex behaviors. This chapter focuses on the role of computational modeling. It begins by showing that simulations presented as supporting the dual‐route cascade (DRC) model differed from the corresponding behavioral studies. The DRC models were succeeded by a series of hybr...

We investigated how gender is represented in children’s books using a novel 200,000-word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using adult human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We found that children’s books contain many words th...

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in computa...

Many characters in written Chinese incorporate components (radicals) that provide cues to meaning. The cues are often partial, and some are misleading because they are unrelated to the character’s meaning. Previous studies have shown that radicals influence the processing of the characters in which they occur (e.g., Feldman & Siok, 1999). We invest...

Statistical views of literacy development maintain that proficient reading requires the assimilation of myriad statistical regularities present in the writing system. Indeed, previous studies have tied statistical learning (SL) abilities to reading skills, establishing the existence of a link between the two. However, some issues are currently left...

Can the science of reading contribute to improving educational practices, allowing more students to become skilled readers? Much has been learned about the behavioral and brain bases of reading, how students learn to read, and factors that contribute to low literacy. The potential to use research findings to improve literacy outcomes is substantial...

Can the science of reading contribute to improving educational practices, allowing more children to become skilled readers? Much has been learned about the behavioral and brain bases of reading, how children learn to read, and factors that contribute to low literacy. The potential to use research findings to improve literacy outcomes is substantial...

Learning to read words aloud is a major step towards becoming a reader. Many children struggle with the task because of the inconsistencies of English spelling-sound correspondences. Curricula vary enormously in how these patterns are taught. Children are nonetheless expected to master the system in limited time (by grade 4). We used a cognitively...

Developmental dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by difficulties reading words accurately and/or fluently. Several behavioral studies have suggested the presence of anomalies at an early stage of phoneme processing, when the complex spectrotemporal patterns in the speech signal are analyzed and assigned to phonemic categories. In this st...

We investigated how gender is represented in children's books using a 200,000 word corpus comprising 249 popular, contemporary books for young children (0-5 years). Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified the gender biases of words within the corpus and within individual books. We find that children's books contain large nu...

This article reviews the important role of statistical learning for language and reading development. Although statistical learning—the unconscious encoding of patterns in language input—has become widely known as a force in infants’ early interpretation of speech, the role of this kind of learning for language and reading comprehension in children...

Unfamiliar speech—spoken in a familiar language but with an accent different from the listener’s—is known to increase comprehension difficulty. However, there is evidence of listeners’ rapid adaptation to unfamiliar accents (although perhaps not to the level of familiar accents). This paradox might emerge from prior focus on isolated word perceptio...

Unlabelled: The capacity to process information in conceptual form is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, yet little is known about how this type of information is encoded in the brain. Although the role of sensory and motor cortical areas has been a focus of recent debate, neuroimaging studies of concept representation consistently implicate...

Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development...

While major advances have been made in uncovering the neural processes underlying perceptual representations, our grasp of how the brain gives rise to conceptual knowledge remains relatively poor. Recent work has provided strong evidence that concepts rely, at least in part, on the same sensory and motor neural systems through which they were acqui...

Functional neuroimaging and Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) theory, both introduced to cognitive science in the 1980s, led to influential research programmes that have proceeded in parallel with little mutual influence. The PDP approach advanced specific claims about the nature of neural representations that, perhaps surprisingly, have gone l...

Three experiments used homophones as a test case to examine the roles of phonology and morphology in the spelling process. We introduced university students to novel meanings of spoken forms, for example, presenting /fid/ as a rare word for a type of furniture. We asked whether participants avoided spelling the new word as ‹feed›, instead using alt...

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic representat...

Purpose: This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young African American English (AAE)-speaking children's understanding and awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE). Method: Eighty-three 4- to 8-year-old AAE-speaking children participated in 2 experimental tasks. One task evalu...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predi...

Are there multiple ways to be a skilled reader? To address this longstanding, unresolved question, we hypothesized that individual variability in using semantic information in reading aloud would be associated with neuroanatomical variation in pathways linking semantics and phonology. Left-hemisphere regions of interest for diffusion tensor imaging...

Reading disability is a brain-based difficulty in acquiring fluent reading skills that affects significant numbers of children. Although neuroanatomical and neurofunctional networks involved in typical and atypical reading are increasingly well characterized, the underlying neurochemical bases of individual differences in reading development are vi...

The "embodied cognition" approach to semantics proposes that word meanings that are highly associated with particular sensory-motor features are stored in cortical areas involved in the perception of those features. In the present study we performed a new analysis of an fMRI data set in an attempted to characterize the underlying neural organizatio...

Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children's lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference P...

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I main...

A recent study found that dyslexic children trained on action video games show significant improvements on basic measures of both attention and reading ability, suggesting future directions for the study of dyslexia intervention paradigms.

The combining of individual concepts to form an emergent concept is a fundamental aspect of language, yet much less is known about it than about processing isolated words or sentences. To facilitate research on conceptual combination, we provide meaningfulness ratings for a large set of (2,160) noun–noun pairs. Half of these pairs (1,080) are rever...

Languages and writing systems result from satisfying multiple constraints related to learning, comprehension, production, and their biological bases. Orthographies are not optimal because these constraints often conflict, with further deviations due to accidents of history and geography. Things tend to even out because writing systems and the langu...

Hemodynamic Functional Neuroimaging StudiesChronometryDistinct Neural SubstratesConclusion References

Although the left posterior occipitotemporal sulcus (pOTS) has been called a visual word form area, debate persists over the selectivity of this region for reading relative to general nonorthographic visual object processing. We used high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging to study left pOTS responses to combinatorial orthographic and...

We distinguish between literal and metaphorical applications of Bayesian models. When intended literally, an isomorphism exists between the elements of representation assumed by the rational analysis and the mechanism that implements the computation. Thus, observation of the implementation can externally validate assumptions underlying the rational...

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which enco...

If you talk to vision researchers, they think it's known that dyslexia results from a visual processing impairment (specific to the magnocellular pathway). If you talk to hearing researchers, they think it's known that dyslexia results from an auditory processing impairment. If you talk to reading researchers, they think it's very hard to reliably...

The role of sensory-motor systems in conceptual understanding has been controversial. It has been proposed that many abstract concepts are understood metaphorically through concrete sensory-motor domains such as actions. Using fMRI, we compared neural responses with literal action (Lit; The daughter grasped the flowers), metaphoric action (Met; The...

Language consists of sequences of words, but comprehending phrases involves more than concatenating meanings: A boat house is a shelter for boats, whereas a summer house is a house used during summer, and a ghost house is typically uninhabited. Little is known about the brain bases of combinatorial semantic processes. We performed two fMRI experime...

Most current models of word naming are restricted to processing monosyllabic words and pseudowords. This limitation stems from difficulties in representing the orthographic and phonological codes for words varying substantially in length. Sibley, Kello, Plaut, and Elman (2008) described an extension of the simple recurrent network architecture, cal...

This study presents an analysis of language skills in individuals with Noonan syndrome (NS), an autosomal dominant genetic disorder. We investigated whether the language impairments affecting some individuals arise from deficits specifically within the linguistic system or whether they are associated with cognitive, perceptual, and motor factors. C...

Connectionist and dynamical systems approaches explain human thought, language and behavior in terms of the emergent consequences of a large number of simple noncognitive processes. We view the entities that serve as the basis for structured probabilistic approaches as abstractions that are occasionally useful but often misleading: they have no rea...

Although dyslexia is usually diagnosed by poor reading and phonological impairment, the underlying neurobiological cause remains unclear. Individuals with dyslexia frequently exhibit impairments in other, non-linguistic areas, such as visual processing. The variety of observed impairments suggests that reading problems may be only one of several ou...

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which syllable-le...

Cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC) and Noonan syndrome (NS) are two phenotypically overlapping genetic disorders whose underlying molecular etiologies affect a common signaling pathway. Mutations in the BRAF, MEK1, and MEK2 genes cause most cases of CFC and mutations in PTPN11, SOS1, KRAS, and RAF1 typically cause NS. Although both syndromes are a...

Reading aloud involves computing the sound of a word from its visual form. This may be accomplished 1) by direct associations between spellings and phonology and 2) by computation from orthography to meaning to phonology. These components have been studied in behavioral experiments examining lexical properties such as word frequency; length in lett...

The 17 July Reviews by A. N. Meltzoff et al. (“Foundations for a new science of learning,” p. [284][1]) and J. D. E. Gabrieli (“Dyslexia: A new synergy between education and cognitive neuroscience,” p. [280][2]) summarize the enormous progress that has been made in understanding the

The sensory-motor account of conceptual processing suggests that modality-specific attributes play a central role in the organization of object and action knowledge in the brain. An opposing view emphasizes the abstract, amodal, and symbolic character of concepts, which are thought to be represented outside the brain's sensory-motor systems. We con...

Noonan syndrome (NS) is an autosomal-dominant genetic disorder associated with highly variable features, including heart disease, short stature, minor facial anomalies and learning disabilities. Recent gene discoveries have laid the groundwork for exploring whether variability in the NS phenotype is related to differences at the genetic level. In t...

Two primary methods have been used in studies of word reading: small-scale factorial studies and larger scale "megastudies" involving thousands of words. We conducted comparisons between the two, using the frequency X regularity interaction in word naming as test case. Whereas the effect replicates across small-scale studies, the same results were...

Statistical learning is an important element of language acquisition. A basic unresolved question is, what are the units over which statistics are calculated? In a corpus study and two infant behavioral experiments, we show that varying the units that are used greatly affects learning. Using words as units, nouns are easier to segment from continuo...

Functional neuroimaging studies indicate that a primary marker of specific reading disability (RD) is reduced activation of left hemisphere (LH) posterior regions during performance of reading tasks. However, the severity of this disruption, and the extent to which these LH systems might be available for reading under any circumstances, is unclear...

In traditional models of language production grammatical cat-egories are represented as abstract features independent of se-mantics and phonology. An alternative view is proposed where syntactic categories emerge as a higher-order regularity from semantic and phonological properties of words. The proposal was tested using grammatical gender in Serb...

Berent and Pinker (2007) presented five experiments concerning the formation of compounds, especially the apparent restriction on the occurrence of "regular" plurals as modifiers (as in *RATS-EATER). Their data were said to support a "words and rules" approach to inflectional morphology, and to contradict the approach developed by Haskell, MacDonal...

The integrity of phonological representation/processing in dyslexic children was explored with a gating task in which children listened to successively longer segments (gates) of a word. At each gate, the task was to decide what the entire word was. Responses were scored for overall accuracy as well as the children's sensitivity to coarticulation f...

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. The authors investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic and phonological co...

The meaning of a word usually depends on the context in which it occurs. This study investigated the neural mechanisms involved in computing word meanings that change as a function of syntactic context. Current semantic processing theories suggest that word meanings are retrieved from diverse cortical regions storing sensory-motor and other types o...

We tested the hypothesis that deficits on sensory-processing tasks frequently associated with poor reading and dyslexia are the result of impairments in external-noise exclusion, rather than motion perception or magnocellular processing. We compared the motion-direction discrimination thresholds of adults and children with good or poor reading perf...

This chapter focuses on two types of ambiguity: lexical and syntactic ambiguity. The two kinds of ambiguity can interact-for example, adopting noun vs. verb interpretation of man affects how one interprets the syntactic structure of a sentence containing this word. Despite the close relationship between these two types of ambiguity, for much of the...

Mark S Seidenberg is the Donald O Hebb professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the department of psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies the acquisition and use of language and their brain bases using behavioral, neuroimaging and computational modeling methods. He has developed large-scale connectionist models of readi...

The mechanisms underlying nonword pronunciation have a been a focus of debates over dual-route and connectionist models of reading aloud. The present study examined two aspects of nonword naming: spelling-sound consistency effects and variability in the pronunciations assigned to ambiguous nonwords such as MOUP. Performance of a parallel distribute...

In a previous study [Sperling, A. J., Lu, Z. L., Manis, F. R., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2003). Selective deficits in magnocellular processing: A "phantom contour" study. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1422-1429] we found that dyslexic children were relatively slower in processing achromatic phantom contours. The maximum temporal frequency at which they could id...

A b s t r a c t – The sensory-motor account of conceptual processing suggests that modality-specific attributes play a central role in the organization of knowledge in the brain. We conducted an fMRI study in which the participants listened to sentences describing action, visual, or abstract events. A comparison of these conditions revealed that ar...

Computational modelling is a tool that can be used in different ways for different purposes. There are several distinct styles of modelling research in cognitive science and neuroscience, with differing goals, methods, and evalu- ation criteria. Nowhere is this clearer that in the area of lexical processing in reading, in which computational models...

Semantic features have provided insight into numerous behavioral phenomena concerning concepts, categorization, and semantic memory in adults, children, and neuropsychological populations. Numerous theories and models in these areas are based on representations and computations involving semantic features. Consequently, empirically derived semantic...