The role of letters in word identification: A test of the pattern-unit model

Three experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to read short stories and search for either a word with a particular meaning or a word that began with a particular letter. The results of the experiments were consistent with prior data in demonstrating that subjects were able to make word-level decisions faster than they could make component-level decisions. In addition, the final experiment indicated that subjects were no faster at finding a specific predesignated target word than they were at finding a word that belonged to a predesignated target category. The results were interpreted as supporting a model of pattern perception that assumes that the cognitive encoding of a small pattern does not entail any analogous, but prior, encoding of its components. In addition, the final experiment might suggest that the word-level encoding contains a semantic component.