This paper discusses the background and use of the masked priming procedure in adult psycholinguistic research. Using this technique, we address the issue of how precise the letter and word processing systems of adults is for rapidly displayed stimuli. Data is reviewed that suggests that, for skilled readers, the letter and word recognition system is sensitively tuned to the discrimination demands imposed on it by the properties of the written language. That is, the recognition system is able to be discriminative where precision is required, but is also able to consider and use incomplete information when this is predictive.

The masked priming procedure has been widely used in adult psycholinguistic research as a means of exploring early and automatic processes in written word recognition (see Davis & Castles, this issue). In this paper, we discuss the recent extension of this technique for use in exploring written vocabulary development in children learning to read. We first report data to show that robust masked priming effects can be produced in children as young as seven years old. We then outline the results of some recent studies which illustrate how masked priming data can uncover the processes by which children access written word representations and the ways in which these processes may change over time.

Recent work has demonstrated that counts of which other words co-occur with a word of interest can reflect interesting properties of that word. We have studied aspects of this kind of methodology by systematically examining the effects of different combinations of parameters used in the preparation of co-occurrence statistics. Several psychologically relevant evaluation measures are used. We have found that successful performance on the evaluation tasks depends on the correct selection of parameters such as window size and distance metric.

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurological disorder which appears to be increasing in prevalence in the Asia-Pacific region among the elderly. Although PD is considered by many as a motor syndrome, its physiological basis in dopaminergic pathways has recently been associated with cognitive and neurolinguistic changes. This paper attempts to synthesise the common threads running through clinical and empirical work which has supported a specific cognitive word-finding deficit in PD. Recent computational accounts of the observed deficits are also reviewed as one way of testing theories of PD-like lexical-semantic errors, and generating empirically-testable hypotheses.

The present investigation examined older people's views on communication with younger and older adults to determine if older people's perceptions parallel research findings that suggest that young adults view intra-generational communication more positively than inter-generational communication. Additionally, drawing upon the Communication Predicament of Aging model (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, & Henwood, 1986), it considers how these perceptions relate to psychological health. In a first study, older and younger adults from the United States of America responded to a questionnaire survey about their experiences of talking to older and younger adults. The results of analyses of variance suggested that younger adults have less positive perceptions of inter-generational communication than older adults. Regression analyses examined the link between communication climate and psychological health indices, and suggested that psychological health is related to inter-generational and intra-generational communication variables for older participants. In a second study, variations in older adults' intra- and intergroup perceptions were compared across the United States and the People's Republic of China. Unlike their American peers, intergenerational communication was not a significant correlate of adjustment in the Chinese sample, although intragenerational variables were again implicated.