Search results for "Letter case"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
The time course of the lowercase advantage in visual word recognition: An ERP investigation
2020
Previous word identification and sentence reading experiments have consistently shown faster reading for lowercase than for uppercase words (e.g., table faster than TABLE). A theoretically relevant question for neural models of word recognition is whether the effect of letter-case only affects the early prelexical stages of visual word recognition or whether it also influences lexical-semantic processing. To examine the locus and nature of the lowercase advantage in visual word recognition, we conducted an event-related potential (ERP) lexical decision experiment. ERPs were recorded to words and pseudowords presented in lowercase or uppercase. Words also varied in lexical frequency, thus al…
Where is the locus of the lowercase advantage during sentence reading?
2016
While most models of visual word identification and reading posit that a word's visual codes are rapidly transformed onto case-invariant representations (i.e., table and TABLE would equally activate the word unit corresponding to "table"), a number of experiments have shown a lowercase advantage in various word identification and reading tasks. In the present experiment, we examined the locus of this lowercase advantage by comparing the pattern of eye movements when reading sentences in lowercase vs. uppercase. Each sentence contained a target word that was high or low in word-frequency. Overall, results showed faster reading times for lowercase than for uppercase sentences. More important,…
Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?
2018
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,…
Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.
2014
A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the s…