Visual angle and the word superiority effect

Two experiments are reported in which a word superiority effect is obtained under conditions where a fixed set of alternatives are employed with positional certainty as to the critical letter, trial type (word or nonword) is mixed, and the subject is told to fixate the position of the critical letter. A third experiment employed the same methodology except for the fact that the stimuli subtended a larger retinal angle. No word superiority effect was observed in the third experiment. It is suggested that the visual angle of the stimulus display is a crucial factor in experiments on the word superiority effect.     

A developmental, interactive activation model of the word superiority effect

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of reading developed out of an appreciation of the role that context plays in letter and word perception. Adult readers can more accurately identify letters in a word than alone or in other random display contexts, a phenomenon known as the Word Superiority Effect (WSE). We examined the effects of orthographic context on the letter recognition skills of dyslexic children, comparing their performance to adults, and chronological- and reading-age matched groups. Consistent with previous studies, results showed adults better able to identify letters in the context of words and pseudowords than in random letter strings. Young normal readers demonstrated the WSE, but their pseudoword advantage was less than adults. The dyslexic children showed no WSE at all. PDP computer simulations for the experimental data using the Interactive Activation model (IA) suggested that the orthographic components of the lexical system of normal children are interactive and distributed as they are in adults but provide less bottom-up activation. In addition, top-down processing increases with age and reading skill, but may be absent for dyslexic readers.     

A word superiority effect without orthographic assistance

In a binary classification task meaningful but unpronounceable letter strings were compared faster than meaningless strings. This effect obtained when only one member of a pair was meaingful and it increased with number of letters. These results suggest that analysis proceeds in parallel at various levels of the processing hierarchy with interaction between semantic and graphemic processes.     

Some boundary conditions for a word superiority effect

A word superiority effect was obtained using a fixed stimulus set, positional certainty of the critical letter, mixed trial type, and instructions to fixate the critical letter. Control experiments established that this effect was not due to lateral masking. Further experiments extended the finding of a fixed-set word superiority effect to other stimulus sets, and to lowercase and mixed-case stimuli. The mixed-case word superiority effect is inconsistent with supraletter feature models of word recognition and, instead, lends support to hierarchical codes models. It was demonstrated that an unusually wide spacing of letters can disrupt the formation of word-level codes, and that wide visual angles are not necessarily disruptive as long as normal spacing is maintained.     

The word superiority effect in a case ofHiragana letter strings

This paper is concerned with the effect of syllabification in the superior perceptibility of tachistoscopically presented JapaneseHiragana letter strings. TheHiragana letter is a phonetic symbol having an invariant one-syllable pronunciation. Controlling retention and guessing factors, an experiment replicated the original Reicher (1969) findings of a word superiority effect. Thus, the results suggest that letter unitization which depends upon syllable-like structures (the vocalic center groups; Spoehr & Smith, 1973) is not a prerequisite, but that orthographic regularity and meaningfulness may be important determinants of the word superiority effect.     

The word superiority effect: Dependence on short-term memory factors

Two experiments were conducted to test whether the word superiority effect, that letters in words are perceived more accurately than letters in nonwords, could be attributed to short-term memory (STM) factors. One hypothesis attributed the word superiority effect to superior maintenance of words in STM. Another hypothesis was that letters in STM have considerable positional uncertainty which is overcome by the orthographic characteristics of the words. Both experiments utilized a simultaneous same-different task, where subjects compared two four-letter strings, one on top of the other, which were presented tachistoscopically. In Experiment I, the two presented strings were either both words or both nonwords and a word superiority effect was obtained. This result was interpreted as disconfirming the STM maintenance hypothesis. In Experiment II, letters were removed from one of the two letter strings, making the serial position of the comparison unambiguous. The word superiority effect disappeared. This result was interpreted as supporting the positional uncertainty hypothesis.     

Word superiority in word detection

Observers searched for a single precued word or its nonword anagram under conditions of rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). A word advantage was found over a wide range of presentation rates (32-160 msec/frame), under yes-no as well as forced choice conditions, and with both one or two input “channels.” These results suggest that word superiority in word detection occurs at a perceptual locus.     

Identification of letters in the predesignated target paradigm: a word superiority effect for the common word the

The size of the perceptual unit used in reading was addressed using the predesignated target paradigm. Sixteen subjects viewed the following stimuli in random order: the words tee, the, tie, and toe; the nonwords eet, eht, eit, and eot; and the letters e, h, i, and o. Subjects fixated on the location of the center letter and identified the letter as e, h, i, or o, alternatives which were known to them at the onset. A word superiority effect was obtained for the common word the but not for the less common words tee, tie, and toe. The word superiority effect was attributable to bias rather than discriminability: Subjects exhibited a bias to perceive the words in this experiment as the (i.e., there was a bias to perceive h in the t e stimulus presentations). These results suggest that the common word the is processed in reading units that are larger than the letter, and that the system is biased to perceive common rather than uncommon words in data-limited conditions.     

Recognition of affixed words and the word frequency effect

Three experiments are reported in which the word frequency effect is used as a diagnostic for determining whether affixed words coming from the same stem are stored together or separately in the lexicon. Prefixed words are examined in the first experiment, inflected words in the second and third. In the first two experiments, two types of word are compared where the words in each condition are matched on surface or presented frequency but are varied on the frequency of their stems or base frequency. It is found that lexical decision times are influenced by base frequency, thus indicating that words related by affixation are stored together in the lexicon. The third experiment, however, demonstrates that when base frequency is held constant and surface frequency is varied, lexical decision times are influenced by surface frequency. The results are accounted for by a model of word recognition whereby frequency has its effect at two different stages of the recognition process.     

Manipulating the word frequency effect in free recall

A recall advantage for common words was not evidenced when subjects generated or rated the list words on the basis of commonness and on a semantic, phonological, or orthographic basis prior to recall. Recall of the same set of words following only structural judgments of the words resulted in the usual recall advantage for common words. Results were not consistent with interpretations based only on the associative strengths of the recalled items. A process based on categorization of the words to be recalled was suggested as an alternative explanation.     

The word superiority effect: A comparison between restricted and unrestricted alternative set

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the word superiority effect (WSE) (Reicher, 1969). The first two experiments used mixed presentations of words and nonwords, and positional uncertainty of the critical letter. Experiment 1 used an unrestricted set of alternatives, while Experiment 2 used only two alternatives (R and L). Experiment 3 compared letter detection in nonwords with a restricted and unrestricted alternative set. WSE was found for both Experiments 1 and 2, at about the same level. Experiment 3 showed superior performance when alternatives were known in advance. It was concluded that context has an effect on letter recognition even with prior knowledge of alternatives if the critical position is not known in advance. Some incompatibilities between the present results and those of other investigators in the field are discussed.     

The word superiority effect in brief visual displays: Elimination by vocalization

A variation on the experiments of Reicher (1968) and Wheeler (1970) was performed to expose the difference between the perceptual processing of words and that of single letters that leads to the word superiority effect in brief visual displays. The innovation m the present experiment is the use of a 1.5-sec interval between stimulus offset and choice onset during which Ss were required to vocalize the stimulus. A visual noise mask was presented during this interval. A control group was run with the conditions of choice delay and vocalization requirement absent, i.e., they were tested under the conditions used by Reicher and Wheeler. For the control group, recognition accuracy for words was 6.1% greater than for letters, while for the experimental group, recognition accuracy for letters was 5.6% greater than for words.     

The effect of word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty on the eye movements of young and older readers

Young adult and older readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing target words that varied in frequency or predictability. In addition, half of the sentences were printed in a font that was easy to read (Times New Roman) and the other half were printed in a font that was more difficult to read (Old English). Word frequency, word predictability, and font difficulty effects were apparent in the eye movement data of both groups of readers. In the fixation time data, the pattern of results was the same, but the older readers had larger frequency and predictability effects than the younger readers. The older readers skipped words more often than the younger readers (as indicated by their skipping rate on selected target words), but they made more regressions back to the target words and more regressions overall. The E-Z Reader model was used as a platform to evaluate the results, and simulations using the model suggest that lexical processing is slowed in older readers and that, possibly as a result of this, they adopt a more risky reading strategy.     

The initial capitalization superiority effect in German: evidence for a perceptual frequency variant of the orthographic cue hypothesis of visual word recognition

A perceptual frequency variant of the orthographic cue (OC) hypothesis (Peressotti, Cubelli, & Job, 2003) was tested in two perceptual identification experiments using the variable viewing position technique: German nouns and non-nouns that are most frequently perceived with or without initial letter capitalization, respectively, were tachistoscopically presented in upper-case, lower-case, or with initial capitalization. The results indicated that words were best recognized in the form they are most frequently perceived in, which suggests that during reading acquisition abstract as well as case- and item-specific OCs may be learned and used for recognition.     

Recognition of the stimulus degradation in the word frequency effect

Summary An experiment was designed to distinguish between two explanations of the word frequency effect, each accounting for the effect in terms of response bias. One explanation assumes that the bias affects a viewer's percept, the other a decision about what to report. Subjects were shown common and uncommon words, degraded to various degrees. Their task was to state what word was presented and to estimate its degree of degradation. A word frequency effect was demonstrated: the degree of actual degradation at which some arbitrary proportion of common words was correctly reported was greater than that at which the same proportion of uncommon words was correctly reported. In addition, subjects correctly assessed that the common words correctly reported were more degraded. The result was discussed with reference to the two versions of response bias theory.The discussion in this paper was materially assisted by comments made by Donald Broadbent, whose help is gratefully acknowledged.     

The word frequency effect for recognition memory and the elevated-attention hypothesis

Empirical tests were conducted on the elevated-attention hypothesis that low-frequency (LF) words are better recognized than high-frequency (HF) words because LF words attract more attention than do HF words (e.g., Glanzer & Adams, 1990). The elevated-attention hypothesis predicts that the hit rate advantage for LF words should be reduced by increases in attentional strain at study. We first tested this prediction in two experiments by varying the amount of experimenter-controlled study time (on the basis of the assumption that a decrease in study time would reduce the amount of resources available for studying a word). The elevated-attention hypothesis was confirmed, but only when words were studied for relatively short durations. This finding led us to formulate an early-phase elevated-attention hypothesis that proposes that more attentional resources are allocated to LF words than to HF words only during the early phase of encoding (which produces the LF hit rate advantage in subsequent recognition) and that the allocation of attentional resources during the late phase of encoding is not greater for LF words than for HF words. An additional empirical test of this revised hypothesis was conducted: Experimenter-controlled study time and the composition of the to-be-remembered pairs of words were varied orthogonally. The results confirmed the early-phase elevated-attention hypothesis.     

词频与阅读方式对词跨行呈现效应的影响

通过使用眼动追踪技术,采用2（呈现条件：同行呈现、跨行呈现）×2（词频：高频、低频）×2（阅读方式：朗读、默读）的被试内实验设计,探讨了词频和阅读方式对词跨行呈现效应的影响。结果发现,呈现条件、词频和阅读方式的主效应显著,跨行呈现、低频和朗读的凝视时间和总注视时间更长、总注视次数更多;呈现条件之间在凝视时间上的差异,高频词大于低频词;呈现条件之间在凝视时间和总注视次数上的差异,朗读大于默读。结果表明,词跨行呈现干扰了阅读,且这种干扰作用受词频和阅读方式的影响。