We sought to clarify whether the positive association between music lessons and reading ability is explained better by shared resources for processing pitch and temporal information, or by general cognitive abilities. Participants were native and nonnative speakers of English with varying levels of music training. We measured reading ability…

Although there is robust evidence that skilled readers of English extract and use orthographic and phonological information from the parafovea to facilitate word identification, semantic preview benefits have been elusive. We sought to establish whether individual differences in the extraction and/or use of parafoveal semantic information could…

We investigated whether high-skill readers skip more words than low-skill readers as a result of parafoveal processing differences based on reading skill. We manipulated foveal load and word length, two variables that strongly influence word skipping, and measured reading skill using the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. We found that reading skill did…

The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., "sped"), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor ("seed"), a nonword neighbor ("sted"), or…

Although lexical decision remains one of the most extensively studied cognitive tasks, very little is known about its relationship to broader linguistic performance such as reading ability. In a correlational study, several aspects of lateralized lexical decision performance were related to vocabulary and reading comprehension measures, as…