It is well known that automatic lip-reading (ALR), also known as visual speech recognition (VSR), enhances the performance of speech recognition in a noisy environment and also has applications itself. However, ALR is a challenging task due to various lip shapes and ambiguity of visemes (the basic unit of visual speech information). In this paper, we tackle ALR as a classification task using en...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After read...

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not general-topic, sentences. Experiment 3 demonstrate...

Three distinct phenomena are currently at play in medical education: (1) the pervasive use of PowerPoint in teaching, (2) the wholesale application of competency models, and (3) the shift from paper reading to screen reading regardless of course, text, or genre. Finding themselves placed at this intersection, students encounter fewer and fewer opportunities to practice some of the very cognitiv...