Perceptual grouping in visual word recognition

Four experiments are presented in which printed texts are read for their meaning. Some of the texts were mutilated by altering the size of selected letters. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, the number of words mutilated per passage and the number of letters changed per word were both manipulated. In all three experiments, reading was slowed as a function of the number of words changed per passage, while the number of letters changed per word had a much smaller effect. The interaction between the number of words and number of letters changed was not significant in any of the experiments. It is difficult to explain these results merely in terms of changes in the discriminability of letters. In Experiment 2 all uppercase text was used, which argues against an explanation in terms of supraletter features such as word envelope. We propose an explanation in terms of visual attention and the perceptual grouping required prior to feature recognition. The last experiment supports this explanation through the counterintuitive finding that adding letters of intermediate size can improve legibility by allowing grouping processes to associate large and small letters as belonging to the same word object.