Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?
Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…
¿Son necesarios los acentos gráficos en español o es tiempo de jubilarlos?
La acentuación gráfica (tildes) en español es un tema que genera controversia entre los expertos. Partiendo del diferente (des)uso de los acentos gráficos en diferentes lenguas, nos cuestionamos si estos realmente ayudan a la identificación de palabras durante la lectura en español. Investigaciones recientes muestran que la omisión de los acentos gráficos en palabras no conlleva un coste en la lectura respecto a aquellas palabras escritas con sus correspondientes tildes. ¿Estaremos ante la decadencia del acento gráfico en español?
Can letter position encoding be modified by visual perceptual elements?
A plethora of studies has revealed that letter position coding is relatively flexible during word recognition (e.g., the transposed-letter [TL] pseudoword CHOLOCATE is frequently misread as CHOCOLATE). A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that letter identity and location are not perfectly bound as a consequence of the limitations of the visual system. Thus, a complete characterization of letter position coding requires an examination of how letter position coding can be modulated by visual perceptual elements. Here we conducted three lexical decision experiments with TL and replacement-letter pseudowords that manipulated the visual characteristics of the stimuli. In Experiment 1,…