Letters in time and retinotopic space.

Various phenomena in tachistoscopic word identification and priming (WRODS and LTRS are confused with and prime WORDS and LETTERS) suggest that position-specific channels are not used in the processing of letters in words. Previous approaches to this issue have sought alternative matching rules because they have assumed that these phenomena reveal which stimuli are good but imperfect matches to a particular word—such imperfect matches being taken by the word recognition system as partial evidence for that word. The new Letters in Time and Retinotopic Space model (LTRS) makes the alternative assumption that these phenomena reveal the rates at which different features of the stimulus are extracted, because the stimulus is ambiguous when some features are missing from the percept. LTRS is successfully applied to tachistoscopic identification and form priming data with manipulations of duration and target–foil and prime–target relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Direct Assessments of the Processing Time Hypothesis for the Missing-Letter Effect.

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequently used words or in the most frequent meaning of a polysemic word. According to the processing time hypothesis, this occurs because familiar words and meanings are identified faster, leaving less time for letter identification. Contrary to the predictions of the processing time hypothesis, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants were slower at detecting target letters for more frequent words or the most frequent meaning of a word (Experiments 1 and 2) or at detecting the word itself instead of a target letter (Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, participants self-initiated the presentation of each word, and the same pattern of results was observed as in Experiments 1 and 3. Positive correlations were also found between omission rate and response latencies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effect of Age of Acquisition in Visual Word Processing: Further Evidence for the Semantic Hypothesis.

The authors investigated whether the meaning of visually presented words is activated faster for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. They addressed the issue using the semantic Simon paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are instructed to decide whether a stimulus word is printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. However, they have to respond with a verbal label ("living" or "nonliving") that is either congruent with the meaning of the word (e.g., saying "living" to the stimulus DOG) or incongruent (e.g., saying "nonliving" to the stimulus dog). Results showed a significant congruency effect that was stronger for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. The authors conclude that the age of acquisition is an important variable in the activation of the meaning of visually presented words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for Self-Organized Sentence Processing: Digging-In Effects.

Dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing predict "digging-in" effects: The more committed the parser becomes to a wrong syntactic choice, the harder it is to reanalyze. Experiment 1 replicates previous grammaticality judgment studies (F. Ferreira & J. M. Henderson, 1991b, 1993), revealing a deleterious effect of lengthening the ambiguous region of a garden-path sentence. The authors interpret this result as a digging-in effect. Experiment 2 finds a corresponding effect on reading times. Experiment 3 finds that making 2 wrong attachments is worse than making 1. Non-self-organizing models require multiple stipulations to predict both kinds of effects. The authors show that, under an appropriately formulated self-organizing account, both results stem from self-reinforcement of node and link activations, a feature that is needed independently. An implemented model is given. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the Interactivity of Lexical Orthographic and Phonological Processing.

The number and type of connections involving different levels of orthographic and phonological representations differentiate between several models of spoken and visual word recognition. At the sublexical level of processing, Borowsky, Owen, and Fonos (1999) demonstrated evidence for direct processing connections from grapheme representations to phoneme representations (i.e., a sensitivity effect) over and above any bias effects, but not in the reverse direction. Neural network models of visual word recognition implement an orthography to phonology processing route that involves the same connections for processing sublexical and lexical information, and thus a similar pattern of cross-modal effects for lexical stimuli are expected by models that implement this single type of connection (i.e., orthographic lexical processing should directly affect phonological lexical processing, but not in the reverse direction). Furthermore, several models of spoken word perception predict that there should be no direct connections between orthographic representations and phonological representations, regardless of whether the connections are sublexical or lexical... (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociating Stimulus-Stimulus and Response-Response Effects in the Stroop Task.

The separate semantic and response competition interactions between colour and word processing in a manual Stroop task were evaluated by comparing three trial types. Identity trials are both semantically compatible and response compatible (e.g., BLUE in the colour blue), different response trials are both semantically incompatible and response incompatible (e.g., BLUE in the colour green, where blue and green have different response keys), and same response trials are semantically incompatible and response compatible (e.g., the word BLUE in the colour red, where blue and red have the same key press response). Ink colours were embedded in two different word types, colour words, and colour associates. The results using colour words replicated the findings of De Houwer (2003) and demonstrated both a semantic effect (a difference between same response trials and identity trials) and response competition (a difference between same response trials and different response trials). In contrast, the results using colour associates provided evidence for only a semantic effect. These findings support interpretations of the colour associate Stroop effect that attribute the effect to semantics, but challenge Klein's (1964) response competition account and Sharma and McKenna's (1998) claim that the effect of colour associates is dependent on verbal responding. The results confirm that the Stroop colour-word task appears to involve at least two mechanisms, a semantic mechanism and a response competition mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context Effects on Lexical Choice and Lexical Activation.

Speakers are regularly confronted with the choice among lexical alternatives when referring to objects, including basic-level names (e.g., car) and subordinate-level names (e.g., Beetle). Which of these names is eventually selected often depends on contextual factors. The present article reports a series of picture-word interference experiments that explored how the designated target name (basic level vs. subordinate level) and contextual constraints rendering the name alternative either appropriate or inappropriate affect lexical activation and lexical choice. The experimental data demonstrate clear context effects on the eventual lexical choice. However, they also show that alternative nonselected object names are phonologically activated, even if a constraining context makes these alternative names currently inappropriate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of Word Frequency and Contextual Richness on Children's Word Identification Abilities.

To examine the interaction effects of word frequency and contextual richness on word identification, 36 first-grade and 36 third-grade subjects were asked to guess a word that fit into a blank space in sentences which varied in terms of contextual richness. The target word was one member of a pair of high-versus low-frequency synonyms. Beginning with the first letter in a word, each incorrect guess prompted an additional letter cue. The results of a balanced repeated measures design indicated significant main effects for grade level, word frequency, and context and a Frequency × Context interaction, which suggests that contextual richness is more pronounced for high-frequency words and that redundancy models of reading ought to incorporate the notion of response availability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pseudohomophone effects in lexical decision: Still a challenge for current word recognition models.

Computational models that implement a serial mechanism of phonological assembly predict interactions between the size of the pseudohomophone (PsH) effect and stimulus length. Models with frequency-sensitive word representations predict baseword frequency effects. These predictions were tested in a lexical-decision task. The results showed constant PsH effects across different word lengths (in favor of parallel phonological activation) and baseword frequency effects (in favor of frequency-sensitive representations). However, the baseword frequency effect was opposite of what the models predicted. This result is most easily accommodated by models that assume an orthographic verification mechanism. The plausibility of such a mechanism was further supported by the results of 2 additional experiments investigating the effects of response speed and spelling probability (feedback consistency) on the size of the PsH effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of relative-position priming with superset primes.

Four lexical decision experiments are reported that use the masked priming paradigm to study the role of letter position information in orthographic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, superset primes, formed by repetition of 1 or 2 letters of the target (e.g., jusstice-JUSTICE) or by insertion of 1 or 2 unrelated letters (e.g., juastice-JUSTICE), generated significant priming compared with unrelated primes and did not differ significantly from an identity priming condition. In Experiment 3, identity primes generated significantly faster responses than subset primes formed by removal of 2 letters from the target (e.g., jutie-JUSTICE), and subset primes generated faster responses than substitution primes formed by substitution of 2 letters of the target with unrelated letters (e.g., jumlice-JUSTICE). In Experiment 4, insertion of 3 unrelated letters continued to generate facilitation relative to unrelated primes but significantly less so than the identity prime condition. The authors discuss the implications of these results for letter-position coding schemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of success and failure on the discrimination learning of normal and retarded children.

30 normal and 30 retarded children learned a 3-choice size discrimination following exposure to experimental tasks under conditions of success, failure, or neutrality. Both normal and retarded children learned more quickly following success and failure than under the neutral condition. In a 2nd study, 32 normal and 32 retarded children learned the same criterion task under success or failure conditions. Here, both success and failure again facilitated the performance of both normal and retarded Ss. Also, social responsivity interacted with intelligence and exeprimental conditions in influencing the children's learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Reading research: Advances in theory and practice, Vol. 5.

Reviews the book, Reading research: Advances in theory and practice, Vol. 5 by D. Besner, T. G. Waller, and G. E. MacKinnon (1985). This book consists of a Preface and seven independent chapters, all well-written and highly intelligible despite the technical complexity of the material under discussion. Several of the authors present experimental results not previously published. In contrast to many such volumes, the Preface itself is well worth reading, and its integrative skill almost qualifies it as a chapter in itself. In it, the editors discuss the objectives of each chapter, pointing out areas of agreement and disagreement among the chapters and providing a useful introduction. The book as a whole pays little attention to work done in Canada outside Waterloo. Apart from its omission of Canadian work, this book is a very good compendium of the state of understanding of lexical decision, naming, and priming effects as of 1983. Does it have anything to say about reading? That depends on your idea of what reading is. If reading is word identification, then yes; but if it is the process of gathering ideas from writers long ago and far away, then the book has little to do with reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neighbourhood Density, Word Frequency, and Spelling-Sound Regularity Effects in Naming: Similarities and Differences Between Skilled Readers and the Dual Route Cascaded Computational Model.

An experiment with skilled readers and a series of simulations with the Dual Route Cascaded model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) investigated the joint effects of stimulus quality and Neighbourhood Density (N) in nonword naming. Neighbourhood Density and stimulus quality yielded additive effects on reaction time (RT) for skilled readers whereas the model produced an interaction between these factors. A further set of simulations show that DRC also produces an interaction between stimulus quality and (1) word frequency, (2) spelling-sound regularity, and, (3) nonword letter length. None of these three factors interact with stimulus quality in performance by skilled readers. It is suggested that DRC's assumption of cascaded processing throughout represents a central problem. A proposal as to how the model can be modified to accommodate these and other problematic data is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contrasting five different theories of letter position coding: Evidence from orthographic similarity effects.

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors, neighbors-once-removed, and double-substitution neighbors. In Experiment 1, we used an illusory word paradigm and found that neighbor-once-removed similarity contexts resulted in fewer illusory word reports than substitution neighbors but more illusory words than double-substitution neighbors. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a masked form priming technique with a lexical-decision task. The pattern of facilitation was as predicted by spatial coding but was incompatible with slot-coding, Wickelcoding, and both versions of open-bigram coding. These results provide further support for the SOLAR (self-organizing lexical aquisition and recognition) model of visual word identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

German Capitalization of Nouns and the Detection of Letters in Continuous Text.

The missing-letter effect refers to the phenomenon that letters are more difficult to detect in common function words (such as the) than in content words. Assuming that the missing-letter effect is diagnostic of the extraction of text structure, we exploited a special feature of German - the convention to capitalize the initial letter of nouns. Given the great flexibility of word order in German, it was proposed that this convention might help readers specify the structure of the sentence. Therefore orthographic variations that violate the capitalization rules should disrupt structure extraction and should result in a reduced missing-letter effect. The results indicated that: 1) capitalization of function words eliminated the missing-letter effect, but not at the beginning of a sentence; 2) A missing-letter effect occurred when the capitalization of the first letter was correct, but was followed by type-case alternation, and also when the size of the initial letters was relatively large for function words, but relatively small for content words. The results were discussed with respect to the possible contributions of visual familiarity, structural role, and processing time to the missing-letter effect, taking into account that a capitalized initial letter conveys significant information about the word class for German readers. Thus, the present results indicate that readers take advantage not only of function words but of any other information (here the capitalization of nouns) that helps to extract the structure of a sentence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orthography and the Hemispheres: Visual and Linguistic Aspects of Letter Processing.

Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages with a similar morphological structure and orthographies that differ in visual complexity. Two experiments explored the interaction of the characteristics of orthography and hemispheric abilities on lateralized versions of a letter-matching task (Experiment 1) and a global-local task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, native Hebrew readers and native Arabic readers fluent in Hebrew matched letters in the 2 orthographies. The results support the hypothesis that Arabic orthography is more difficult than Hebrew orthography for participants who can read both languages and that this difficulty has its strongest effects in the left visual field. In Experiment 2, native Arabic speakers performed a global-local letter detection task with Arabic letters with 2 types of inconsistent stimuli: different and similar. The results support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere of skilled Arabic readers cannot distinguish between similar Arabic letters, whereas the left hemisphere can. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of instructional set and need for social approval on commonality of word association responses.

This study investigated the effect of various instructional sets (speed, relaxed time instructions, and "set popular" instructions) on commonality of word associations. Findings were generally supportive of the hypotheses: significantly more common associations were given under speed as compared to relaxed instructions, Ss were able to significantly increase their commonality scores under a set to give popular responses, and need for social approval was differentially related to commonality under relaxed but not under speed instructions. Contrary to a suggestion of Jenkins, social sensitivity (as reflected in the need for approval measure) was not related to the ability to increase one's commonality score under "set popular" instructions. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing strategies and letter spacing in the simultaneous- and successive-display matching tasks.

The study examines the effect of adding extra blank space between the letters of eight-letter pseudowords (e.g., HEMINDOL vs. H E M I N D O L) on subjects' performance in both a simultaneous- and a successive-display matching task. The experiment shows that the effects of the manipulation depend on the task. In the simultaneous-display condition extra spacing between letters served to reduce response latencies, whereas in the successive-display condition the extra space between letters increased response latencies. The results belie an explanation based on visual factors such as retinal acuity and lateral masking and are discussed in terms of an information processing account which includes a spacing-sensitive operator. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Snakes and Cats in the Flower Bed: Fast Detection Is Not Specific to Pictures of Fear-Relevant Animals.

The observation that snakes and spiders are found faster among flowers and mushrooms than vice versa and that this search advantage is independent of set size supports the notion that fear-relevant stimuli are processed preferentially in a dedicated fear module. Experiment 1 replicated the faster identification of snakes and spiders but also found a set size effect in a blocked, but not in a mixed-trial, sequence. Experiment 2 failed to find faster identification of snake and spider deviants relative to other animals among flowers and mushrooms and provided evidence for a search advantage for pictures of animals, irrespective of their fear relevance. These findings suggest that results from the present visual search task cannot support the notion of preferential processing of fear relevance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When Words Collide: Facilitation and Interference in the Report of Repeated Words From Rapidly Presented Lists.

Inhibited encoding is the basis of some accounts of repetition blindness--impaired report of the second occurrence of a repeated word in a rapidly presented word sequence. The author presents evidence for the claim that repetition effects arise from constructive processes of perception and memory that occur to some extent after the word sequence has been presented. Unpredictable postlist cues prompted subjects to report either the entire list or just the final word in the list. Repetition impaired the report of the second occurrence of a repeated word under full report but facilitated the report of such items when only the final word had to be reported. The author modulated this dissociation by presenting repeated words in sentences rather than unrelated word lists. The sensitivity of the effects of repetition to postlist cues supports a construction rather than an encoding inhibition account of repetition blindness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)