I will talk here about three problems that have bothered me for a number of years, during which time I have experimented with a variety of solutions and encouraged others to work on them. I have raised each of them separately both in full and in passing in various contexts, but thought it would be worthwhile on this occasion to bring them to your attention side by side. In this talk I will expl...

PURPOSE Many well-accepted systems for determining difficulty level exist for books children read independently, but few are available for determining the wide range of difficulty levels of storybooks read aloud to preschoolers. Also, the available tools list book characteristics only on the basis of parents' or authors' opinions. We created an empirically derived difficulty-level system on the...

Skinfold assessment is valid and economical; however, it has a steep learning curve, and many programs only include one exposure to the technique. Increasing the number of exposures to skinfold assessment within an undergraduate curriculum would likely increase skill proficiency. The present study combined observational and Think Aloud methodologies to quantify procedural and cognitive characte...

Morphological errors in reading aloud (e.g., sexist-->sexy) are a central feature of the symptom-complex known as deep dyslexia, and have historically been viewed as evidence that representations at some level of the reading system are morphologically structured. However, it has been proposed (Funnell, 1987) that morphological errors in deep dyslexia are not morphological in nature but are actu...

The neural correlates of verbal self-monitoring were examined by measuring the response to alterations in auditory verbal feedback while subjects read aloud. Six normal subjects were studied with PET, using H2(15)O as a tracer of regional CBF. There was no difference between the temporal cortical response to reading aloud (and hearing one's own speech) and reading silently while hearing the wor...

Thinking Aloud Thinking Aloud is the most commonly used technique used to test users ́ interaction with computers. The assumption is that Think Aloud gives access to what goes on in the users ́ minds. However, interfaces are multi modal and play heavily on user ́s visual perception. Reflecting upon Think Aloud (TA), we ask the question: what happens when users are required to verbalise their visua...

Most models of reading aloud have been constructed to explain data in relatively complex orthographies like English and French. Here, we created an Italian version of the Connectionist Dual Process Model of Reading Aloud (CDP++) to examine the extent to which the model could predict data in a language which has relatively simple orthography-phonology relationships but is relatively complex at a...

Research seeking to uncover the mechanisms by which we read aloud has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic items presented in isolation. Consequently, important challenges that arise when considering polysyllabic word reading, such as stress assignment, have been ignored, while little is known about how important sentence-level stress cues, such as syntax and rhythm, may influence word re...

It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the production effect-the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading aloud, a cost of reading silently, or both. To help interpret wi...

A summative usability evaluation of a desktop virtual reality (VR) system was developed and a preliminary study then conducted. The purpose of the study was twofold. Firstly, to test whether the traditional evaluation technique, co-operative evaluation, is effective in the evaluation of desktop VR systems. Co-operative evaluation is a variation on a ‘think-aloud’ verbal protocol, whereby, in ad...