The role of letter recognition in word recognition

In a paradigm that avoids methodological problems of earlier studies, evidence was gathered addressed to the question of whether we read letter by letter. If word recognition involves letter recognition, then the difficulty of recognizing a word should vary with the difficulty of recognizing its letters. This was tested by assessing letter difficulty in two letter discrimination tasks and in a letter naming task, and then comparing 15 adult subjects' visual recognition latency to 72 easy-letter words and to 72 difficult-letter words. Word frequency and word length were also manipulated. Results indicated no effect for letter difficulty, although recognition latency reliably decreased with word frequency and monotonically increased with word length (21 msec/letter), suggesting that we do not read letter by letter, but that whatever plays a role in word recognition is smaller than the word and correlated with word length in letters.     

Some factors affecting tachistoscopic letter recognition

Summary The paper reports a series of studies that attempt to examine the issue of tachistoscopic identification of letter material. In particular a reductionist approach is used to investigate the influence of retinal locus, cerebral dominance, metacontrast, letter symmetry, and ocular dominance on the task. Retinal locus, metacontrast, and ocular dominance were shown to influence letter reportability under the present conditions with, it is argued, retinal locus and metacontrast affecting the integrity of the icon. Evidence is given for the construct of ocular dominance as the eye (dominant) initiating eye movements with the other passively following.     

Intra- and interpattern relations in letter recognition.

Strings of 4 unrelated letters were backward masked at varying durations to examine 3 major issues. (a) One issue concerned relational features. Letters with abnormal relations but normal elements were created by interchanging elements between large and small normal letters. Overall accuracy was higher for letters with normal relations, consistent with the idea that relational features are important in recognition. (b) Interpattern relations were examined by mixing large and small letters within strings. Relative to pure strings, accuracy was reduced, but only for small letters and only when in mixed strings. This effect can be attributed to attentional priority for larger forms over smaller forms, which also explains global precedence with hierarchical forms. (c) Forced-choice alternatives were manipulated in Experiments 2 and 3 to test feature integration theory. Relational information was found to be processed at least as early as feature presence or absence.     

Temporal order of strokes primes letter recognition

Does the perception of objects that are the result of human actions reflect the underlying temporal structure of the actions that gave rise to them? We tested whether the temporal order of letter strokes influences letter recognition. In three experiments, participants were asked to identify letters that temporally unfolded as an additive sequence of letter strokes, either consistent or inconsistent with common writing action. Participants were significantly faster to identify letters from consistent temporal sequences, indicating that the initial part of the sequence contained sufficient information to prime letter recognition. We suggest that letter perception reflects the temporal structure of letter production; in other words, Simon sees as Simon does.     

Temporal order of strokes primes letter recognition

Does the perception of objects that are the result of human actions reflect the underlying temporal structure of the actions that gave rise to them? We tested whether the temporal order of letter strokes influences letter recognition. In three experiments, participants were asked to identify letters that temporally unfolded as an additive sequence of letter strokes, either consistent or inconsistent with common writing action. Participants were significantly faster to identify letters from consistent temporal sequences, indicating that the initial part of the sequence contained sufficient information to prime letter recognition. We suggest that letter perception reflects the temporal structure of letter production; in other words, Simon sees as Simon does.     

Multidimensional letter similarity derived from recognition errors

In order to provide a reliable measure of the similarity of uppercase English letters, a confusion matrix based on 1,200 presentations of each letter was established. To facilitate an analysis of the perceived structural characteristics, the confusion matrix was decomposed according to Luce’s choice model into a symmetrical similarity matrix and a response bias vector. The underlying structure of the similarity matrix was assessed with both a hierarchical clustering and a multidimensional scaling procedure. This data is offered to investigators of visual information processing as a valuable tool for controlling not only the overall similarity of the letters in a study, but also their similarity on individual feature dimensions.     

The time course of visual influences in letter recognition

This study builds on a specific characteristic of letters of the Roman alphabet—namely, that each letter name is associated with two visual formats, corresponding to their uppercase and lowercase versions. Participants had to read aloud the names of single letters, and event-related potentials (ERPs) for six pairs of visually dissimilar upper- and lowercase letters were recorded. Assuming that the end product of processing is the same for upper- and lowercase letters sharing the same vocal response, ERPs were compared backward, starting from the onset of articulatory responses, and the first significant divergence was observed 120 ms before response onset. Given that naming responses were produced at around 414 ms, on average, these results suggest that letter processing is influenced by visual information until 294 ms after stimulus onset. This therefore provides new empirical evidence regarding the time course and interactive nature of visual letter perception processes.     

Addressing issues of workplace harassment: counseling the targets

Workplace violence has recently received attention because of the killing of several individuals by their coworkers. However, more common are passive and nonfatal forms of aggressive behavior that are manifested as psychological and emotional harassment. Workplace harassment includes dysfunctional personal interactions characterized by bullying behaviors, personal attacks, and attempts to denigrate others. Targets of workplace harassment may experience stress, depression, low self‐esteem, loss of sleep, and even posttraumatic stress disorder. Strategies that counselors can use to work effectively with targets are discussed.     

Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition

Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g.,astre-autre) or the fourth letter (chope-chose). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only tochope-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letterp inchope). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual word recognition.     

Sequential letter and word recognition in deaf and hearing subjects

To examine the processing of sequentially presented letters of familiar and nonsense words, especially among Ss of vastly differing experience on sequential tasks, three groups of Ss were tested on letters of words spelled sequentially on an alphanumeric display and on letters of words fingerspelled. These were a deaf group (N=33) with little or no hearing and who varied in their fingerspelling ability; a staff group (N=12) who taught fingerspelling and were highly proficient; and a hearing group (N=19). Of principal interest was the finding that the hearing Ss did better on nonsense letter recognition, while the deaf group did better on word recognition. Word length was important except to the staff Ss on fingerspelled words, which also suggests that concentration on fingerspelling proficiency forces attention to the whole word and not its component letters. Hearing Ss, who are the group faced with an unfamiliar task, seemed to attend to each letter and hence had more difficulty with recognition of the longer unit.     

The role of external letter positions in visual word recognition

A key issue for any computational model of visual word recognition is the choice of an input coding schema, which is responsible for assigning letter positions. Such a schema must reflect the fact that, according to recent research, nonwords created by transposing letters (e.g., caniso for CASINO ), typically, appear to be more similar to the word than nonwords created by replacing letters (e.g., caviro ). In the present research, we initially carried out a computational analysis examining the degree to which the position of the transposition influences transposed-letter similarity effects. We next conducted a masked priming experiment with the lexical decision task to determine whether a transposed-letter priming advantage occurs when the first letter position is involved. Primes were created by either transposing the first and third letters (démula-MEDULA ) or replacing the first and third letters (bérula-MEDULA). Results showed that there was no transposed-letter priming advantage in this situation. We discuss the implications of these results for models of visual word recognition.     

Some evidence for parallel comparisons in a letter recognition task

Subjects were asked to judge successively presented letter trigrams “same” or “different.” The different stimuli were divided into four groups; not confusable (NC), acoustically confusable (AC), visually confusable (VC), and both visually and acoustically confusable (VC & AC). Reaction times (RT) were lengthened only by the double confusability. It is argued that comparisons are normally made in both channels, so that confusability in a single channel has no effect since the alternative channel is unimpaired. RTs are only increased when both channels are slowed down. A further experiment confirms this interpretation. When the situation is manipulated so that only the visual channel is employed, the VC group shows the same increase as the VC & AC group.     

Font regularity constraints on the process of letter recognition

Strings of four unrelated letters were presented for subjects to identify, followed by a patterned mask and then a forced choice test of each letter position. In Experiment 1, the type style in the regular conditions was consistent--all of the letters were of a single type font--whereas in the mixed condition, each string contained letters from two type fonts. Compared with the mixed condition, accuracy in the regular conditions was higher overall and increased at a faster rate as a function of processing time. This held across four sessions. In Experiment 2, the font in the mixed condition was varied either between or within letter strings; sizeable advantages for the regular conditions were found with both mix-methods. The results are consistent with the idea of a schemalike perceptual system that becomes tuned to the regularities of a particular font in order to process visual information efficiently.     

The effect of set size on hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition

Single letters were presented tachistoscopically in the left or right hemifield to right-handed observers. Superior recognition of letters on the right was found for letters chosen from subsets containing four items, but no differences were found when any letter, or any symmetrical letter, could appear. In a second experiment, the right hemifield advantage was found under conditions requiring the subject to determine the subset only when the subset chosen was appropriate. Results were discussed in terms of the adequacy of language-based explanations of hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition.