The Presentation of Self in Letters of Application: A Mixed‐Method Approach

The application letter, as the first phase of employment‐seeking, is an opportunity for a job applicant to make a favorable impression on a potential employer. In the current study, the author used a mixed‐method approach to empirically explore strategies for self‐presentation in job application letters and determine the methods used in the letters and their lexical content. An array of self‐presentation strategies, both structural (relating to the formal aspect of the letters) and tactical (involving specific tactics or strategies), were identified and discussed. Job candidates’ self‐evaluation strategies in application letters may contribute to a more accurate assessment of interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies. The results suggest that lexical and meaning levels of analysis in letters of application should be treated as distinct.     

Effects of noise letters on decisions: Discrete or continuous flow of information?

Four forced-choice letter-detection experiments examined the effect on detection latency of noise letters that were visually similar to target letters. A single target letter was present in each display. Noise letters were similar to the target letter present in the display (the signal), to a different target letter assigned to the same response as the signal, or to a target letter assigned to the opposite response from the signal. Noise letters were present in either relevant or irrelevant display positions, and two quite different stimulus sets were used. The experiments were designed to test a prediction of models in which information about noise letters is transmitted continuously from the recognition to the decision process. These models predict that responses should be faster when noise letters are visually similar to a target assigned to the same response as the signal than when noise letters are similar to a target assigned to the opposite response. Statistically reliable effects of the type predicted by continuous models were obtained when noise letters appeared in relevant display positions, but not when they appeared in irrelevant positions.     

THE LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION: SPECIFICITY AND FAVORABILITY OF INFORMATION

Ninety-eight personnel directors each read one variation of a letter of recommendation contained in a 2 (specific examples versus no examples) X 2 (numerical data versus nonspecific adjective modifiers) X 2 (favorable letter versus one unfavorable statement) factorial design. A survey of their perceptions revealed that the example specificity and favorability main effects increased several positive perceptions of the recommendee. Example specificity also enhanced the perceived credibility of the letter writer. The letter variations containing specific examples with either no numbers or one unfavorable statement produced the most positive perceptions of the recommendee. One implication of these findings is that writers of letters of recommendation should emphasize specific performance examples. Whether citing numerical data or negative information is effective requires further study.     

Letter position dyslexia in Arabic: from form to position

This study reports the reading of 11 Arabic-speaking individuals with letter position dyslexia (LPD), and the effect of letter form on their reading errors. LPD is a peripheral dyslexia caused by a selective deficit to letter position encoding in the orthographic-visual analyzer, which results in migration of letters within words, primarily of middle letters. The Arabic orthography is especially interesting for the study of LPD because Arabic letters have different forms in different positions in the word. As a result, some letter position errors require letter form change. We compared the rate of letter migrations that change letter form with migrations that do not change letter form in 10 Arabic-speaking individuals with developmental LPD, and one bilingual Arabic and Hebrew-speaking individual with acquired LPD. The results indicated that the participants made 40% letter position errors in migratable words when the resulting word included the letters in the same form, whereas migrations that changed letter form almost never occurred. The error rate of the Arabic-Hebrew bilingual reader was smaller in Arabic than in Hebrew. However, when only words in which migrations do not change letter form were counted, the rate was similar in Arabic and Hebrew. Hence, whereas orthographies with multiple letter forms for each letter might seem more difficult in some respects, these orthographies are in fact easier to read in some forms of dyslexia. Thus, the diagnosis of LPD in Arabic should consider the effect of letter forms on migration errors, and use only migratable words that do not require letter-form change. The theoretical implications for the reading model are that letter form (of the position-dependent type found in Arabic) is part of the information encoded in the abstract letter identity, and thus affects further word recognition processes, and that there might be a pre-lexical graphemic buffer in which the checking of orthographic well-formedness takes place.     

Encoder: a connectionist model of how learning to visually encode fixated text images improves reading fluency

This article proposes that visual encoding learning improves reading fluency by widening the span over which letters are recognized from a fixated text image so that fewer fixations are needed to cover a text line. Encoder is a connectionist model that learns to convert images like the fixated text images human readers encode into the corresponding letter sequences. The computational theory of classification learning predicts that fixated text-image size makes this learning difficult but that reducing image variability and biasing learning should help. Encoder confirms these predictions. It fails to learn as image size increases but achieves humanlike visual encoding accuracy when image variability is reduced by regularities in fixation positions and letter sequences and when learning is biased to discover mapping functions based on the sequential, componential structure of text. After training, Encoder exhibits many humanlike text familiarity effects.     

Développement de la connaissance des lettres capitales. Étude transversale chez les enfants français de trois à six ans

The present study examined the knowledge of uppercase letters in 160 children aged from three to six. Three tasks were administrated: letter saying, letter naming, letter recognition. Children's responses were analyzed according to several variables: school level, gender, task, letter type, letter frequency, etc. Letter knowledge improved from three to six years, but with huge differences among children, namely the superiority of girls over boys. Letter by letter analyses showed that scores were highly consistent between tasks and school levels. They also revealed that letter knowledge was affected by letter type, letter frequency, alphabetic rank and the presence of letters in the child's first name. The findings are discussed for their contribution to the understanding of letter learning.     

Teaching early braille literacy skills within a stimulus equivalence paradigm to children with degenerative visual impairments

Despite the need for braille literacy, there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate braille-instruction programs. The current study evaluated an instructive procedure for teaching early braille-reading skills with 4 school-aged children with degenerative visual impairments. Following a series of pretests, braille instruction involved providing a sample braille letter and teaching the selection of the corresponding printed letter from a comparison array. Concomitant with increases in the accuracy of this skill, we assessed and captured the formation of equivalence classes through tests of symmetry and transitivity among the printed letters, the corresponding braille letters, and their spoken names.     

A test of the Sophisticated Guessing Theory of word perception

Under difficult viewing conditions, a letter in a familiar word can be perceived more accurately than the same letter alone or in a string of unrelated letters. Sophisticated Guessing Theory asserts that perception is more accurate when a letter appears in a word because its identity is constrained by the identity of neighboring context letters. Experiment 1 tested the following prediction: A letter in a word should be perceived more accurately in strongly constraining word contexts than in weakly constraining word contexts. No such trend was found using a number of different measures of contextual constraint and perceptual accuracy. Experiment 2 verified that, with the same conditions used in Experiment 1 to test Sophisticated Guessing Theory, a strong perceptual advantage could be obtained for letters in words vs. letters alone or in unrelated-letter strings. Several alternative theories of word perception are discussed. The most attractive asserts that for words an additional higher-level perceptual code is formed that is more resistant to degradation than the code formed for letters.     

Preferring alphabet–keyboard compatibility: Congruency between spatial codes shapes the affective connotation of letters

When letters are encountered, two spatial stimulus codes resulting from their positions within the alphabet and on the computer keyboard are activated mentally. If these two spatial codes match, letter processing is more efficient. The present study tested whether the processing fluency gain resulting from alphabet–keyboard compatibility also enhances affective evaluations of letters. In Experiment 1, participants preferred alphabet–keyboard compatible over incompatible letters in a forced-choice preference rating. Similarly, in Experiment 2, liking ratings for alphabet–keyboard compatible letters were higher compared to incompatible letters. Moreover, in Experiment 3, preference ratings of non-words were positively correlated with the relative number of alphabet–keyboard compatible letters within these letter strings. These findings suggest that alphabet–keyboard compatibility shapes the affective connotation of letters. Moreover, this processing fluency–valence association is activated at the level of letters as well as whole letter strings.     

Response latency in visual search with redundancy in the visual display

Two experiments were run to investigate the effects of redundant display items upon response latency in a visual search task. In the first study, Ss searched five-letter displays for a predesignated critical letter. Both critical and noncritical letters could be repeated in the displays. Mean response latency decreased markedly with increasing redundancy in the critical letter and was affected to a lesser extent by redundancy in the noncritical letters. In the second study, Ss were required to detect the presence of redundant letters in displays of from two to five letters, first with no information as to what letter might be repeated, then with knowledge of which letter would be repeated if the display contained a redundant letter. Response latencies in the former case were much slower than in the latter. The implications of these findings for current views of visual information processing were discussed.     

Letter Interactions in Brief Visual Displays

Three experiments were conducted to examine the influence of non-target letters on target detection performance. It was hypothesised that letters which are similar would exert a stronger masking influence on each other than letters which have a low level of feature similarity. The results indicate, however, that every letter has the same inhibitory potential regardless of its similarity rating to other letters. The highly significant letter interactions which did occur in the study were interpreted as evidence for an additive, rather than a subtractive, influence by the non-targets. It is proposed that when a target has an ambiguous identity, due to an impoverished representation, it may be disambiguated by the addition of feature information from the immediate letter context. The effect of filling in the target representation with a feature value from a non-target letter will be to weight the final representation towards the target which has the value most similar to the one substituted. In a sense, then, non-targets which are similar to a target can actually enhance target detection scores.     

Application of geometric models to letter recognition: distance and density

This article reviews studies in which a single letter is visually presented under adverse conditions and the subject's task is to identify the letter. The typical results for such studies are (a) certain pairs of letters are more often confused than other pairs of letters; (b) certain letters are more easily recognized than others; and (c) confusion errors for a letter pair are often asymmetric, the number of errors differing depending on which letter of the pair is presented as the stimulus. A geometric model incorporating the properties of distance and spatial density (after Krumhansl) is presented to account for these results. The present application of the distance-density model assumes that each letter is constructed in a typical 5 X 7 dot matrix. Each letter is represented in 35-dimensional space based on its constituent dots. A central idea behind the model, embodied in the property of spatial density, is that an explanation of typical results must take into account the relationship of the entire stimulus set to both the presented letter and the responded letter. Specifically, according to the model, (a) pairs of letters that are close in geometric space are more often confused than pairs of letters that are distant; (b) letters that are in less spatially dense regions are more easily recognized than letters that are in more spatially dense regions; and (c) asymmetric confusion errors result when one member of a letter pair is in a denser region than the other member of the letter pair. The distance-density model is applied to published and unpublished results of the authors as well as published results from two other laboratories. Alternative explanations of the three typical letter recognition results are also considered. The most successful alternative explanations are (a) confusions are an increasing function of the number of dots that two letters share; (b) letters constructed from fewer dots are easier to recognize; and (c) asymmetries arise when one member of a letter pair is more easily recognized, since that letter then has fewer confusion errors to give to the other letter of the pair. The model is discussed in terms of the distinction between template matching and feature analysis. An alternative classification of letter recognition models is proposed based on the global versus local qualities of features and the spatial information associated with each feature. The model is extended to explain reaction time study results. It is suggested that the distance-density model can be used to create optimal letter fonts by minimizing interletter confusions and maximizing letter recognizability.     

Interference effect caused by repetition in visual recognition of letters: Examination of the orthographic difference between two same letters1

Abstract: The present study examined the effect of phonological identity between two letters on the visual recognition of the letters. Participants were required to identify the two same or different letters that were successively presented for a short duration. In order to manipulate the phonological identity of the two letters, the orthography of the Kana letters was varied. In half of the trials, the first and second letters were presented in Hiragana (the same‐orthography condition). In the other half, the first letter was presented in Katakana, and the second letter in Hiragana (the different‐orthography condition). The results revealed that the identification performance for the second letter was reduced in the same‐orthography condition when the two letters were the same, compared with when they were different. In contrast to this, in the different‐orthography condition, the identification performance of the second repeated letter was marginally superior to that of the nonrepeated letter. Considering the present findings together with those of the author's previous study (Kuwana, 2004), it is suggested that the interference effect caused by repetition could result from the reduction in the availability of visual pattern information stored in long‐term memory.     

Memory of a speaker's voice: Reaction time to same- or different-voiced letters

Subjects were presented with a sequence of two letters, each letter spoken in either a male or female voice. On each trial, the subject was required to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether the two letters had the same name. Reaction times (RTs) were faster for letters spoken in the same voice for both “same” and “different” responses, even when letters were separated by 8 s. These results are incompatible with the notion of physical and name codes in auditory memory since a “different” response should always be based on a comparison of letter names and should not be influenced by voice quality. It was also found that RTs were not influenced by the phonemic distinctive feature similarity of the letters.     

Assessment of the Readability of Genetic Counseling Patient Letters

Patient letters are a powerful tool that genetic counselors use to communicate with their patients. Patient letters are often sent to provide information on a new diagnosis, reiterate test results, and to serve as a permanent record of the visit. Patient letters, however, are only helpful if the patients can understand them. More than 50 % of the US population reads below a 9th grade reading level and over one-third of the population has low health literacy skills. In this study we evaluate the readability of genetic counseling patient letters by assessing reading level, image use, and terminology use. One hundred forty-nine genetic counselors participated in the survey and of these, 79 submitted a sample patient letter. Analyses of the letters revealed a mean reading level of 10.93. On average, 6 genetic terms were included in each letter, and only 25 % of these terms were defined. Analyses of survey responses revealed over 75 % of the genetic counselors did not include images in their patient letters. These results indicate there is room for improvement in order to make genetic counseling patient letters more accessible to the general population.     

Competing top-down processes in visual selection: evidence that selection by location is stronger than selection by color

The purpose of this study was to examine whether color and position information are functionally equivalent when observers are asked to select simultaneously on both dimensions. Observers were asked to report a letter of a given color from a given region of a briefly flashed letter array, then to report any additional letters they could recall from the stimulus set. Of the additional letters, more location letters were reported than were same-color or neutral letters. The results suggested that position information has priority over color information in top-down-guided visual selection.     

The involvement of letter names in the silent processing of isolated letters: A developmental perspective

This study was designed to clarify the nature of the mental representations underlying the processing of letters. A total of 96 Hebrew readers randomly recruited from three levels of education were asked to make rapid same/different judgments for Hebrew letter dyads with monosyllabic and bisyllabic names. The results obtained from the performance of participants under perceptual and conceptual processing conditions suggest that Hebrew readers access nominal letter representations in order to mediate letter processing in tasks that cannot be resolved on the basis of a sheer perceptual analysis of the letters?? visual properties. The finding that the retrieval of nominal letter representations was evident for participants who differed rather markedly in their letter-processing speeds highlights the central role of letter names in the processing of isolated letters.     

Representation of letter position in spelling: Evidence from acquired dysgraphia

The graphemic representations that underlie spelling performance must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also the positions of the letters. This study investigates how letter position information is represented. We present evidence from two dysgraphic individuals, CM and LSS, who perseverate letters when spelling: that is, letters from previous spelling responses intrude into subsequent responses. The perseverated letters appear more often than expected by chance in the same position in the previous and subsequent responses. We used these errors to address the question of how letter position is represented in spelling. In a series of analyses we determined how often the perseveration errors produced maintain position as defined by a number of alternative theories of letter position encoding proposed in the literature. The analyses provide strong evidence that the grapheme representations used in spelling encode letter position such that position is represented in a graded manner based on distance from both-edges of the word.     

Figure-ground formation by movement: influences and effects

A twelve-letter array was segmented into figure and ground by moving some of its letters. Moved letters were shifted one letter-width left of right, independently of each other, in apparent movement. Since the figure of a display attracts attention, identification of letters of the figure segment should show an advantage over letters of the background segment. Three results are of interest. First, moved letters were identified more accurately and faster than stationary letters when only one or two letters moved. Stationary letters showed the advantage when eight of the twelve letters moved. This result suggests that the segment seen as figure is determined by both rapidly encodable letter movement and by the number of moved letters within the display. Second, segmentation of the visual display acids identification of moved letters in less than 90 ms, or well before the eye can move to the selected letter position. Third, letters in the figure segment which are closer to fixation are more likely to be identified than more eccentric letters.     

Processing of sequentially presented letters

The effect on the number of letters S can report of the duration of each sequentially presented letter was compared with that of processing time, defined as the time from the onset of a letter to the onset of the next letter. Four Ss were each shown 1250 common English words, from four to eight letters long, one letter at a time. Each letter acted as a visual noise field for the preceding letter. The duration of each letter and the interval between letters was varied independently. The S reported the letters he saw after each word was displayed. It was found that the processing time (onset to onset) predicted the number of letters correctly reported, regardless of the partition between on time and off time. A calculation was made of the number of milliseconds of on plus off time that are needed to ensure correct report of each letter. This time was independent of the duration of the processing time, but was positively correlated with the number of letters in the word. This correlation is probably in part artifactual, so that no claim can be made that it takes longer to process a letter of a long as compared to a short word.