6533b82afe1ef96bd128c121
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?
Manuel PereaAna MarcetMarta Vergara-martínezsubject
Letter caseVisual word recognitionVisual perceptionComputer sciencebusiness.industry05 social sciencesExperimental and Cognitive PsychologyGeneral Medicinecomputer.software_genre050105 experimental psychologyDigital media03 medical and health sciences0302 clinical medicineArts and Humanities (miscellaneous)Word recognitionLexical decision task0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesArtificial intelligencebusinesscomputer030217 neurology & neurosurgeryGeneral PsychologyNatural language processingdescription
Abstract. Most words in books and digital media are written in lowercase. The primacy of this format has been brought out by different experiments showing that common words are identified faster in lowercase (e.g., molecule) than in uppercase (MOLECULE). However, there are common words that are usually written in uppercase (street signs, billboards; e.g., STOP, PHARMACY). We conducted a lexical decision experiment to examine whether the usual letter-case configuration (uppercase vs. lowercase) of common words modulates word identification times. To this aim, we selected 78 molecule-type words and 78 PHARMACY-type words that were presented in lowercase or uppercase. For molecule-type words, the lowercase format elicited faster responses than the uppercase format, whereas this effect was absent for PHARMACY-type words. This pattern of results suggests that the usual letter configuration of common words plays an important role during visual word processing.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-03-01 | Experimental Psychology |