Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production

Recent studies on handwriting production and neuropsychological data have suggested that orthographic representations are multilevel structures that encode information on letter identity and order, but also on intermediate-grained processing units such as syllables and morphemes. This study on handwriting production examined whether orthographic representations also include a graphemic-processing level. French adults wrote words containing an embedded one-, two-, or three-letter grapheme (e.g., a in clavier, ai in prairie, ain in plainte) on a digitizer. The results for letter duration revealed that the timing of movement processing depends on grapheme length (e.g., the duration of a for one-letter graphemes was shorter than that for two-letter graphemes, which, in turn, was shorter than that for three-letter graphemes). Two- and three-letter graphemes start to be processed before we start to write them. The results therefore revealed that orthographic representations also encode information on grapheme complexity.     

Structural complexity of motor patterns: A study on reaction times and movement times of handwritten letters

This study investigates the effects of psychomotor complexity on latencies for beginning to write single letters and numerals, and on times taken to complete the first strokes of letters and numerals. An experiment measured simple and choice reaction times for writing homogeneous graphemes (i.e., letters or numerals made up of similar strokes) and for writing heterogeneous graphemes (i.e., characters made up of dissimilar strokes). It was assumed that the motor programme for writing a letter is retrieved from long-term memory and briefly held, until it is used, in a short-term buffer store. The experiment examined the hypothesis that it is more difficult to read out homogeneous than heterogeneous stroke-structures from this store. For three out of four allographic grapheme pairs, homogeneous graphemes required longer initiation times or longer movement times for completion of the first stroke than did heterogeneous graphemes. These results are discussed in relation to recent findings on motor programming based on the use of reaction-time paradigms.     

Evidence for the automatic processing of prelexical codes in an orthographic but not a phonological task

The automatic activation of phonological and orthographic information in auditory and visual word processing was examined using a task-set procedure. Participants engaged in a phonological task (i.e., determining whether the letter “a” in a word sounded like /e/ or /æ/) or an orthographic task (i.e., determining whether the sound /s/ in a word was spelled with an “s” or a “c”). Participants were cued regarding which task to perform simultaneously with, or 750 ms before, a clear or degraded target. The stimulus clarity effect (i.e., clear words responded to faster than degraded words) was absorbed into the time that it took participants to identify the task on the basis of the cue in a simultaneous cue–target as compared to a delayed cue–target condition, but only for the orthographic task. These data are consistent with the claim that prelexical processing occurs in a capacity-free manner upon stimulus presentation when participants are trying to extract orthographic codes from words presented in the visual and auditory modalities. Such affirmative data were not obtained when participants attempted to extract phonological codes from words, since here the effects of stimulus clarity and cue delay were additive.     

Graphemes are perceptual reading units

Graphemes are commonly defined as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word 'BREAD' is composed of the four phonemes /b/, /r/, /e/ and /d/, and consequently, of the four graphemes 'B', 'R', 'EA', and 'D'. Graphemes can thus be considered the minimal 'functional bridges' in the mapping between orthography and phonology. In the present study, we investigated the hypothesis that graphemes are processed as perceptual units by the reading system. If the reading system processes graphemes as units, then detecting a letter in a word should be harder when this letter is embedded in a multi-letter grapheme than when it corresponds to a single-letter grapheme. In Experiment 1A, done in English, participants were slower to detect a target letter in a word when the target letter was embedded in multi-letter grapheme (i.e. 'A' in 'BEACH') than when it corresponded to a single-letter grapheme (i.e. 'A' in 'PLACE'). In Experiment 1B, this effect was replicated in French. In Experiment 2, done in English, this grapheme effect remained when phonemic similarity between the target letter alone and the target letter inside the word was controlled. Together, the results are consistent with the assumption that graphemes are processed as perceptual reading units in alphabetic writing systems such as English or French.     

Colours sometimes count: Awareness and bidirectionality in grapheme–colour synaesthesia

Three experiments were conducted with 10 grapheme–colour synaesthetes and 10 matched controls to investigate (a) whether awareness of the inducer grapheme is necessary for synaesthetic colour induction and (b) whether grapheme–colour synaesthesia may be bidirectional in the sense that not only do graphemes induce colours, but that colours influence the processing of graphemes. Using attentional blink and Stroop paradigms with digit targets, we found that some synaesthetes did report “seeing” synaesthetic colours even when they were not able to report the inducing digit. Moreover, congruency effects (effects of matching the colour of digit presentation with the synaesthetic colour associated with that digit) suggested that grapheme–colour synaesthesia can be bidirectional, at least for some synaesthetes.     

Seeing double: the role of meaning in alphanumeric-colour synaesthesia

When PD, an alphanumeric-colour synaesthete, is shown black digits or letters, each grapheme elicits a highly specific colour, called a "photism" (e.g., a 2 induces green, a Z induces brown). Previous experiments showed that photisms interfere with video-colour naming when the photism colour and the video colour are incongruent. Here we used coloured ambiguous graphemes that could be interpreted as either digits or letters depending on context (e.g., an ambiguous grapheme was interpreted as a 2 if presented within a block of digit trials, but as a Z if presented within a block of letter trials). Ambiguous graphemes were presented in video colours that were either congruent or incongruent with PD's photisms. Crucially, what was a congruent trial in one context was an incongruent trial in the other context. PD's pattern of response times indicated that identical graphemes could induce differently coloured photisms depending on their interpretation. This suggests that the meaning of graphemes ultimately determines their synaesthetic colour.     

Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng)

The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people—particularly younger people—communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled “texters”. SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost—both at a local level and at a global level—for individuals who are highly expert in SMS language. Furthermore, phonological abbreviations resulted in a greater cost than orthographic abbreviations.     

The interaction of synesthetic and print color and its relation to visual imagery

Synesthetic color induced by graphemes is well understood to be an automatic perceptual phenomenon paralleling print color in some ways, but also differing in others. We addressed this juxtaposition by asking how synesthetes are affected by synesthetic and print colors that are the same. We tested two groups of grapheme–color synesthetes using a basic color-priming method in which a grapheme prime was presented, followed by a color patch (probe), the color of which was to be named as quickly and accurately as possible. The primes induced either no color, print color only, synesthetic color only, or both forms of color (e.g., a letter “A” printed in red that also triggered synesthetic red). As expected, responses to name the probe color were faster if it was congruent with the prime color than if it was incongruent. The new finding (Exp. 1) was that a prime that induced the same print and synesthetic colors led to substantially larger priming effects than did either type of color individually, an effect that could not be attributed to semantic priming (Exp. 2). In addition, the synesthesia effects correlated with a standard measure of visual imagery. These findings are discussed as being consistent with the hypothesis that print and synesthetic color converge on similar color mechanisms.     

Quantifying the reliance on different sublexical correspondences in German and English

The type of sublexical correspondences employed during non-word reading has been a matter of considerable debate in the past decades of reading research. Non-words may be read either via small units (graphemes) or large units (orthographic bodies). In addition, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences may involve context-sensitive correspondences, such as pronouncing an “a” as /?/ when preceded by a “w”. Here, we use an optimisation procedure to explore the reliance on these three types of correspondences in non-word reading. In Experiment 1, we use vowel length in German to show that all three sublexical correspondences are necessary and sufficient to predict the participants' responses. We then quantify the degree to which each correspondence is used. In Experiment 2, we present a similar analysis in English, which is a more complex orthographic system.     

Orthographic redundancy in letter recognition: Orthographic neighbourhood or orthographic context?

Abstract

In explaining the word-superiority effect (i.e. the better detection of a letter in a word than in a nonword), the Interactive Activation Model (IAM) of McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) and the Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception (FLMP) of Massaro (1979) emphasise the importance of orthographic redundancy (i.e. the regularities of letters within words) in different ways. In the IAM, orthographic redundancy is defined by the number of “friends”; that is, words sharing the same letters except one with the word containing the target letter. Such friends constitute the orthographic “neighbourhood”. FLMP stresses the orthographic “context”; that is, the similarity of the word with a representation in the lexicon. The orthographic neighbourhood and context are manipulated independently in Experiment 1, and the findings are better understood in terms of the orthographic neighbourhood. By increasing the number of friends in nonwords, better letter detection is also obtained in nonwords as compared with letter detection in random letter strings (Experiment 2). These findings, together with the position effects obtained, are more clearly in agreement with the IAM than with the FLMP.     

Biases and regularities of grapheme–colour associations in Japanese nonsynaesthetic population

Associations between graphemes and colours in a nonsynaesthetic Japanese population were investigated. Participants chose the most suitable colour from 11 basic colour terms for each of 40 graphemes from the four categories of graphemes used in the Japanese language (kana characters, English alphabet letters, and Arabic and kanji numerals). This test was repeated after a three-week interval. In their responses, which were not as temporally consistent as those of grapheme–colour synaesthetes, participants showed biases and regularities that were comparable to those of synaesthetes reported in past studies. Although it has been believed that only synaesthetes, and not nonsynaesthetes, tended to associate graphemes with colours based on grapheme frequency, Berlin and Kay's colour typology, and colour word frequency, participants in this study tended in part to associate graphemes with colours based on the above factors. Moreover, participants that were nonsynaesthetes tended to associate different graphemes that shared sounds and/or meanings (e.g., Arabic and kanji numerals representing the same number) with the same colours, which was analogous to the findings in Japanese synaesthetes. These results support the view that grapheme–colour synaesthesia might have its origins in cross-modal association processes that are shared with the general population.     

Orthography, phonology, short-term memory and the effects of concurrent articulation on rhyme and homophony judgements

The role of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) in phonological judgement tasks of print has been widely explored using concurrent articulation (CA). A number of studies have examined the effects of CA on written word/nonword rhyme and homophone judgements but the findings have been mixed and few studies have examined both tasks within subjects. Also important is the influence of orthographic similarity on such tasks (i.e., items that share phonology often strongly overlap on orthography). Although there are reports of orthographic similarity effects (e.g., LOAD-TOAD vs. DIAL-MILE) on rhyme judgements, it is unknown whether (a) similar orthographic effects are present with homophone judgements, (b) the degree to which such orthographic effects interact with CA, and (c) the degree to which such orthographic effects interact with lexical status (words vs. nonwords). The present work re-examines these three issues in a within subject design. CA and orthographic similarity yielded subtle differences across tasks. CA impaired accuracy for both homophone and rhyme judgement, but only slowed RTs on the rhyme judgement task, and then only for words. Orthographic similarity yielded an increase in false positives for similar items and vice versa for dissimilar items, suggesting a general impact of an orthographically based ‘bias’ in choosing similar or dissimilar sounding items. This pattern was amplified under CA but only on the homophone judgement task. These results highlight important interactions between phonological and orthographic representations in phonological judgement tasks, and the findings are considered both with reference to earlier studies and several models of pSTM.     

阅读障碍儿童的形音捆绑缺陷及其脑神经机制

形音捆绑缺陷研究是国内外阅读障碍研究领域的一个新方向。本文阐述了形音捆绑加工的理论与定义,综述了国内外研究者经常采用的三种形音捆绑的研究范式:配对联想学习、变化检测范式和线索回忆任务,介绍并分析了各研究范式的优缺点、适用范围及主要研究发现。同时,综述与评价了国内外有关阅读障碍形音捆绑缺陷的脑机制研究的主要结论及不足。最后,本文讨论了现有研究在实验设计和理论上的贡献与不足,提出了今后的研究方向和改进建议。     

Bad–good constraints on a polarity correspondence account for the spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) and markedness association of response codes (MARC) effects

Performance in numerical classification tasks involving either parity or magnitude judgements is quicker when small numbers are mapped onto a left-sided response and large numbers onto a right-sided response than for the opposite mapping (i.e., the spatial–numerical association of response codes or SNARC effect). Recent research by Gevers et al. [Gevers, W., Santens, S., Dhooge, E., Chen, Q., Van den Bossche, L., Fias, W., & Verguts, T. (2010). Verbal-spatial and visuospatial coding of number–space interactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 180–190] suggests that this effect also arises for vocal “left” and “right” responding, indicating that verbal–spatial coding has a role to play in determining it. Another presumably verbal-based, spatial–numerical mapping phenomenon is the linguistic markedness association of response codes (MARC) effect whereby responding in parity tasks is quicker when odd numbers are mapped onto left-sided responses and even numbers onto right-sided responses. A recent account of both the SNARC and MARC effects is based on the polarity correspondence principle [Proctor, R. W., & Cho, Y. S. (2006). Polarity correspondence: A general principle for performance of speeded binary classification tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 416–442]. This account assumes that stimulus and response alternatives are coded along any number of dimensions in terms of – and + polarities with quicker responding when the polarity codes for the stimulus and the response correspond. In the present study, even–odd parity judgements were made using either “left” and “right” or “bad” and “good” vocal responses. Results indicated that a SNARC effect was indeed present for the former type of vocal responding, providing further evidence for the sufficiency of the verbal–spatial coding account for this effect. However, the decided lack of an analogous SNARC-like effect in the results for the latter type of vocal responding provides an important constraint on the presumed generality of the polarity correspondence account. On the other hand, the presence of robust MARC effects for “bad” and “good” but not “left” and “right” vocal responses is consistent with the view that such effects are due to conceptual associations between semantic codes for odd–even and bad–good (but not necessarily left–right).     

The Multilevel Modality-Switch Effect: What Happens When We See the Bees Buzzing and Hear the Diamonds Glistening

Previous studies demonstrated that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) brings about a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect. We report an experiment designed to assess the influence of the mode of presentation (i.e., visual, aural) of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification and lexical decision priming paradigm. Participants were required to perform a property verification or a lexical decision task on a target sentence (e.g., “a BEE buzzes”, “a DIAMOND glistens”) presented either visually or aurally after having been presented with a prime sentence (e.g., “the LIGHT is flickering”, “the SOUND is echoing”) that could either share both, one or none of the target’s mode of presentation and content modality. Results show that the mode of presentation of stimuli affects the conceptual modality-switch effect. Furthermore, the depth of processing required by the task modulates the complex interplay of perceptual and semantic information. We conclude that the MSE is a task-related, multilevel effect which can occur on two different levels of information processing (i.e., perceptual and semantic).     

The “BIG BIRD” of the “YELLOW YOUNG” man: Do nontarget properties cascade?

This study investigated whether in speech production object properties flow in a cascaded manner or whether cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw pictured objects and had to state either their size (GRAND or PETIT—meaning big and small) or their name. The size of the objects varied as a function of the way they were presented on the computer screen (Experiment 1) or their real size in the world (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, faces of young and old men were coloured in yellow or in green. The task was to name either the colour (JAUNE or VERT, meaning yellow and green, respectively) or the age (JEUNE or VIEUX, meaning young and old, respectively) of the face. In Experiments 1 and 2, no reliable effects of phonological relatedness (“GORILLE–grand”—a big gorilla) were found on the object-naming latencies. However, size-naming latencies were shorter when the adjective shared the initial phoneme of the picture name (i.e., “GRAND–gorille”) than when it did not (i.e., “GRAND–dinosaure”—saying “big” in response to a big dinosaur). In Experiment 3, phonological overlap did not affect colour naming latencies, or age naming latencies. Overall, these findings strongly suggest that cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity in conceptually driven naming tasks.     

The structure of graphemic representations

The analysis of the spelling performance of a brain-damaged dysgraphic subject is reported. The subject's spelling performance was affected by various graphotactic factors, such as the distinction between consonant and vowel and graphosyllabic structure. For example, while the subject produced many consonant and vowel deletion errors when these were part of consonant and vowel clusters, respectively (e.g., sfondo----sondo; giunta----gunta), deletions were virtually never produced for single consonants flanked by two vowels (e.g., onesto----oesto) or for single vowels flanked by two consonants (e.g., tirare----trare). The demonstration that graphosyllabic factors affect spelling performance disconfirms the hypothesis that graphemic representations consist simply of linearly ordered sets of graphemes. It is concluded that graphemic representations are multidimensional structures: one dimension specifies the grapheme identities that comprise the spelling of a word; a second dimension specifies the consonant/vowel status of the graphemes; a third dimension represents the graphosyllabic structure of the grapheme string; and, a fourth dimension provides information about geminate features.     

The impact of object type on the spatial analogies in Korean preschoolers

We tested young children’s spatial reasoning in a match-to-sample task, manipulating the objects in the task (abstract geometric shapes, line drawings of realistic objects, or both). Korean 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 161) generalized the target spatial configuration (i.e., on, in, above) more easily when the sample used geometric shapes and the choices used realistic objects than the reverse (i.e., realistic-object sample to geometric-shape choices). With within-type stimuli (i.e., sample and choices were both geometric shapes or both realistic objects), 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children generalized the spatial relations more easily with geometric shapes than realistic objects. In addition, children who knew more locative terms (e.g., “in”, “on”) performed better on the task, suggesting a link to children’s spatial vocabulary. The results demonstrate an advantage of geometric shapes over realistic objects in facilitating young children’s performance on a match-to-sample spatial reasoning task.     

The Modulation of Visual and Task Characteristics of a Writing System on Hemispheric Lateralization in Visual Word Recognition—A Computational Exploration

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) biases in the LH. We show two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme‐phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme‐phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme‐phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing.