Biomedical subjects

M Brysbaert

Publications and source records attributed to M Brysbaert.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1992

Reading isolated words: no evidence for automatic incorporation of the phonetic code.

Backward masking with a homophonic mask induces better target recognition than backward masking with a graphemic mask that shares the same letters with the target as the homophonic mask. From this, the existence of automatic prelexical phonological recoding in silent word reading has been inferred. The present experiments, however, show that the advantage of homophonic masks in a backward-masking task only arises if a considerable proportion of the masks are phonologically related to the targets (at least for Dutch). The results are in line with findings of lexical-decision tasks and number-processing tasks, and constitute a further argument for the dominance of the orthographic route over the phonological route in processing isolated written words.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

The syllable-length effect in number processing is task-dependent.

Two experiments were run in order to investigate the relationship between syllable length of number names and eye-fixation durations during silent reading of one- and two-digit numbers. In Experiment 1, subjects had to read a series of three numbers and recall them orally; in Experiment 2, subjects had to indicate manually whether the value of the middle number was between the values of the outer numbers. The effect of syllable length was controlled for possible confounding effects of number frequency and number magnitude. Findings indicated that fixation duration depended on syllable length of number names in the first task, but not in the second task. The results call into question the claim that phonological encoding is imperative in visual processing; phonological encoding was used only when the numbers had to be recalled, and not when they were coded for computational purposes.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Tachistoscopic presentation of verbal stimuli for assessing cerebral dominance: reliability data and some practical recommendations.

Reliability data point to rather high test-retest correlations (greater than or equal to 0.65) for VHF data with four- and five-letter words as stimuli, but replicate previous findings that the first test score correlates poorly with later test scores. The same results are obtained for accuracy and latency data, though small differences exist. All laterality indices lead to the same conclusions and have high intercorrelations. The point-biserial correlation coefficient is, however, a slightly more reliable index of naming latency than the mere difference between LVF and RVF. No such superiority is found for the indices based on accuracy data. The results also point to the need to present a sufficient number of stimuli before firm conclusions can be drawn.

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Individual analysis of laterality data.

Graphical and statistical analyses are presented that allow one to check for an individual subject whether the performance during a session is stable, whether the difference between the left and the right visual half-field is significant, and whether the performance is uniform over different sessions. Analyses are given for accuracy data and for latency data. Though the analyses are described for a visual half-field experiment, they can easily be adapted for other laterality tasks.

Attention↗