Search results for "Visual Word"
showing 10 items of 65 documents
ERP correlates of transposed-letter priming effects: The role of vowels versus consonants
2008
One key issue for any computational model of visual-word recognition is the choice of an input coding scheme for assigning letter position. Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). We report a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which the pseudoword primes were created by transposing/replacing two consonants or two vowels while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude at an early window (150-250 ms) and at the N400 component for vowels but not for consonant transpositions. In ad…
Does Extra Interletter Spacing Help Text Reading in Skilled Adult Readers?
2016
AbstractA number of experiments have shown that, in skilled adult readers, a small increase in interletter spacing speeds up the process of visual word recognition relative to the default settings (i.e., judge faster than judge). The goal of the present experiment was to examine whether this effect can be generalized to a more ecological scenario: text reading. Each participant read two stories (367 words each) taken from a standardized reading test. The stories were presented with the standard interletter spacing or with a small increase in interletter spacing (+1.2 points to default) in a within-subject design. An eyetracker was used to register the participants’ eye movements. Comprehens…
Early use of phonological codes in deaf readers: An ERP study.
2017
Previous studies suggest that deaf readers use phonological information of words when it is explicitly demanded by the task itself. However, whether phonological encoding is automatic remains controversial. The present experiment examined whether adult congenitally deaf readers show evidence of automatic use of phonological information during visual word recognition. In an ERP masked priming lexical decision experiment, deaf participants responded to target words preceded by a pseudohomophone (koral - CORAL) or an orthographic control prime (toral - CORAL). Responses were faster for the pseudohomophone than for the orthographic control condition. The N250 and N400 amplitudes were reduced fo…
On the flexibility of letter position coding during lexical processing: Evidence from eye movements when reading Thai
2012
Previous research supports the view that initial letter position has a privileged role in comparison to internal letters for visual-word recognition in Roman script. The current study examines whether this is the case for Thai. Thai is an alphabetic script in which ordering of the letters does not necessarily correspond to the ordering of a word's phonemes. Furthermore, Thai does not normally have interword spaces. We examined whether the position of transposed letters (internal, e.g., porblem, vs. initial, e.g., rpoblem) within a word influences how readily those words are processed when interword spacing and demarcation of word boundaries (using alternatingbold text) is manipulated. The …
Structural hemispheric asymmetries underlie verbal Stroop performance
2017
Performance on tasks involving cognitive control such as the Stroop task is often associated with left lateralized brain activations. Based on this neuro-functional evidence, we tested whether leftward structural grey matter asymmetries would also predict inter-individual differences in combatting Stroop interference. To check for the specificity of the results, both a verbal Stroop task and a spatial one were administered to a total of 111 healthy young individuals, for whom T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images were also acquired. Surface thickness and area estimations were calculated using FreeSurfer. Participants' hemispheres were registered to a symmetric template and Lat…
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,…
The processing of consonants and vowels during letter identity and letter position assignment in visual-word recognition: an ERP study.
2009
Abstract Recent research suggests that there is a processing distinction between consonants and vowels in visual-word recognition. Here we conjointly examine the time course of consonants and vowels in processes of letter identity and letter position assignment. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed under different conditions in a masked priming paradigm with a 50-ms SOA: (i) identity/baseline condition e.g., chocolate-CHOCOLATE); (ii) vowels-delayed condition (e.g., choc l te-CHOCOLATE); (iii) consonants-delayed condition (cho o ate-CHOCOLATE); (iv) consonants-transposed condition (…
Does viotin activate violin more than viocin? On the use of visual cues during visual-word recognition.
2013
The vast majority of neural and computational models of visual-word recognition assume that lexical access is achieved via the activation of abstract letter identities. Thus, a word’s overall shape should play no role in this process. In the present lexical decision experiment, we compared word-like pseudowords like viotín (same shape as its base word: violín) vs. viocín (different shape) in mature (college-aged skilled readers), immature (normally reading children), and immature/impaired (young readers with developmental dyslexia) word-recognition systems. Results revealed similar response times (and error rates) to consistent-shape and inconsistent-shape pseudowords for both adult skille…
Does Bold Emphasis Facilitate the Process of Visual-Word Recognition?
2014
AbstractThe study of the effects of typographical factors on lexical access has been rather neglected in the literature on visual-word recognition. Indeed, current computational models of visual-word recognition employ an unrefined letter feature level in their coding schemes. In a letter recognition experiment, Pelli, Burns, Farell, and Moore-Page (2006), letters in Bookman boldface produced more efficiency (i.e., a higher ratio of thresholds of an ideal observer versus a human observer) than the letters in Bookman regular under visual noise. Here we examined whether the effect of bold emphasis can be generalized to a common visual-word recognition task (lexical decision: “is the item a wo…
How is Visual Recognition Entrained by Auditory Background Rhythms?
2014
AbstractRecent studies have reported that the oscillations of auditory attention entrained by a background rhythmic sequence can influence performance in visual recognition tasks. We have designed an experimental paradigm in which a visual item (either a bisyllabic word or a familiar face) is displayed on screen in two consecutive parts while a musical rhythm is played in the background. Depending on the timing conditions, the first or the second part of the item could be presented either in-synchrony or out-of-synchrony with the beats of the auditory rhythm. In a first series of experiments, participants performed a lexical decision task on bisyllabic 5-letter strings. Results show that wh…