The present study examined the visual scanning hypothesis, which suggests that fluent oculomotor control is an important component underlying the predictive relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks and reading ability. Our approach was to isolate components of saccadic planning, articulation, and lexical retrieval in three modified RAN tasks. We analyzed two samples of undergraduate readers (age 17–27), we evaluated the incremental contributions of these components and found that saccadic planning to non-linguistic stimuli alone explained roughly one-third of the variance that conventional RAN tasks explained in eye-movements registered during text reading for comprehension. We conclude that the well-established predictive role of RAN for reading performance is in part due to the individual ability to coordinate rapid sequential eye-movements to visual non-linguistic stimuli.

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This paper explores the question of when and how morphological families are formed in one?s mental lexicon, by analyzing age-of-acquisition norms to morphological families (e.g., booking, bookshelf, check book) and their shared morphemes (book). We demonstrate that the speed of growth and the size of the family depend on how early the shared morpheme is acquired and how many connections the family has at the time a new concept is incorporated in the family. These findings dovetail perfectly with the Semantic Growth model of connectivity in semantic networks by Steyvers and Tenenbaum (2005). We discuss implications of our findings for theories of vocabulary acquisition.

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