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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The time course of processing handwritten words: An ERP investigation

Eva Gutierrez-sigutCristina Gil-lópezManuel PereaManuel CarreirasMarta Vergara-martínez

subject

HandwritingCognitive Neurosciencemedia_common.quotation_subjectSpeech recognitionExperimental and Cognitive PsychologyLegibility050105 experimental psychology03 medical and health sciencesBehavioral Neuroscience0302 clinical medicineHandwritingPerceptionEncoding (memory)Lexical decision taskHumans0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesEvoked Potentialsmedia_commonVisual word recognitionVisual word processing05 social sciencesERPsComputingMethodologies_PATTERNRECOGNITIONPattern Recognition VisualReadingTime courseComputingMethodologies_DOCUMENTANDTEXTPROCESSINGVisual PerceptionHandwritten word processingVisual word recognitionPsychology030217 neurology & neurosurgery

description

Available online 25 June 2021. Behavioral studies have shown that the legibility of handwritten script hinders visual word recognition. Furthermore, when compared with printed words, lexical effects (e.g., word-frequency effect) are magnified for less intelligible (difficult) handwriting (Barnhart and Goldinger, 2010; Perea et al., 2016). This boost has been interpreted in terms of greater influence of top-down mechanisms during visual word recognition. In the present experiment, we registered the participants’ ERPs to uncover top-down processing effects on early perceptual encoding. Participants’ behavioral and EEG responses were recorded to high- and low-frequency words that varied in script’s legibility (printed, easy handwritten, difficult handwritten) in a lexical decision experiment. Behavioral results replicated previous findings: word-frequency effects were larger in difficult handwriting than in easy handwritten or printed conditions. Critically, the ERP data showed an early effect of word-frequency in the N170 that was restricted to the difficult-to-read handwritten condition. These results are interpreted in terms of increased attentional deployment when the bottom-up signal is weak (difficult handwritten stimuli). This attentional boost would enhance top-down effects (e.g., lexical effects) in the early stages of visual word processing The research reported in this article has been partially funded by: Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Grant PSI2017-86210-P); Basque Government through the BERC 2018–2021 program; Agencia Estatal de Investigación through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence award SEV-2015-0490; and through project RTI2018-093547-B-I00.

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2021-01-01
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107924http://hdl.handle.net/10810/52179