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Letter position coding in printed word perception: Effects of repeated and transposed letters
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2004
Year
Cognitive ScienceNeurolinguisticsHandwritingPrinted Word PerceptionCognitionPsycholinguisticsPerceptionLanguage StudiesCharacter RecognitionSpeech PerceptionPsychophysicsMultisensory IntegrationLinguisticsSocial SciencesLetter Position
The authors investigate how repeated and transposed letters influence orthographic processing and introduce a revised open‑bigram coding scheme to explain the findings. They employed masked‑priming lexical‑decision experiments using primes generated by removing a letter, transposing adjacent letters, or replacing them with different letters. Removal primes produced robust priming regardless of repetition, repeated letters made targets harder, and transposition priming occurred for 7‑letter words regardless of position but vanished when letters were replaced, with 5‑letter words showing priming only for inner transpositions.
We report four experiments investigating the effects of repeated and transposed letters in orthographic processing. Orthographically related primes were formed by removing one letter from the target word, by transposing two adjacent letters, or by replacing two adjacent letters with different letters. Robust masked priming in a lexical decision task was found for primes formed by removing a single letter (e.g., mircle-MIRACLE), and this was not influenced by whether or not the prime contained a letter repetition (e.g., balace vs. balnce as a prime for BALANCE ). Target words containing a repeated letter tended to be harder to respond to than words without a letter repetition, but the nonwords formed by removing a repeated letter (e.g., BALNCE) were no harder to reject than nonwords formed by removing a non-repeated letter (e.g., MIRCLE, BALACE). Significant transposition priming effects were found for 7-letter words (e.g., sevrice-SERVICE), and these priming effects did not vary as a function of the position of the transposition (initial, final, or inner letter pair). Priming effects disappeared when primes were formed by replacing the two transposed letters with different letters (e.g., sedlice-SERVICE), and five-letter words only showed priming effects with inner letter transpositions (e.g., ponit-POINT). We present a revised "open-bigram" scheme for letter position coding that accounts for these data.