| Abstract: | We have a surprising tendency to misperceive the center of visually presented words (). To understand the origin of this bias, four experiments assessed the impact of letter font, letter size, and grapheme-phoneme convergences on perceived stimulus center. Fourteen observers indicated the perceived centers of words, pseudowords, consonant strings, and lines with a mouse cursor. Visual orthographic factors had no effect on perceived word center but grapheme-phoneme convergence did: Observers compensated for strong grapheme-phoneme asymmetries in the letter strings. These findings support the idea that the cognitive representation of words is spatially distorted as a result of lexical access mechanisms. |
