Where is the locus of the lowercase advantage during sentence reading?

Finding a City Name in a Traffic Sign: Effects of Word Case and Visual Motion

OBJECTIVES

To investigate the word recognition effects of the use of all-uppercase (e.g., VALENCIA) or titled-case (e.g., Valencia) for city names in traffic signs, controlling for word size, and comparing stationary and dynamic viewing situations.

BACKGROUND

Prior studies provide mixed evidence regarding the effects of word case on the recognition of city names in traffic signs. Moreover, the evidence on the potential impact of visual motion on these effects is scarce.

METHOD

We carried out an experimental study using simulated traffic signs. The task was to indicate, for each sign, whether it contained a given city name or not (word search task, 50% positive trials). Visual motion of signs was manipulated as a between-participants factor: stationary (the sign was still) versus dynamic (the sign expanded as if the participant was approaching to it). Word case was manipulated as a within-participants factor: all-uppercase versus two titled-case conditions varying in font size: width-matched titled-case and point size-matched titled-case.

RESULTS

In both the stationary and dynamic conditions, all-uppercase resulted in more incorrect responses and slower latencies than width-matched titled-case. When compared to point size-matched titled-case, all-uppercase produced slower correct responses in the stationary condition, whereas faster in the dynamic condition.

CONCLUSION

Other factors being equal, all-uppercase city names will be recognized worse than their titled-case versions in traffic signs, both in stationary and dynamic situations.

APPLICATION

Results in the current experimental study would be of interest in the design of traffic signs and other circumstances in which text is presented in motion.

Effects of alternating letter case on processing sequences of written words

In three grammatical decision experiments, we examined the impact of alternating letter case on sentence reading to determine the locus of case-alternation effects. Experiments 1 and 2 compared grammatical decision responses ("Is this a grammatically correct sequence of words or not?") in three different conditions: (1) SAME CASE/same case; (2) alternating CASE between WORDS; and (3) aLterNaTing cAsE wItHin WoRdS. For the grammatically correct sequences, we observed significantly faster responses in the same-case conditions compared with the between-word case manipulation, as well as a significant advantage for the between-word condition compared with within-word alternating case. These results confirm that case-alternation deteriorates sentence reading, but more so at the level of single word processing (within-word alternation) than at the sentence level (between-word alternation). Experiment 3 demonstrated that between-word case-alternation facilitates sentence processing compared with an all-lowercase condition when betweenWORDspacesAREremoved. Therefore, in the absence of between-word spacing, case changes across words facilitate sentence processing, possibly by guiding readers' eyes to optimal locations for word identification.

A systematic literature review of LASA error interventions

AIMS

The aim of this systematic review was to explore and evaluate the efficacy of interventions to reduce the prevalence of look-alike, sound-alike (LASA) medication name errors.

METHODS

We conducted a systematic review of the literature, searching PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus and Web of Science up to December 2016, and re-ran the search in February 2020 for later results. We included studies of interventions to reduce LASA errors and included randomized controlled trials, controlled before-and-after studies, and interrupted time series. Details were registered in Prospero (ID: CRD42016048198).

RESULTS

We identified six studies that fulfilled our inclusion criteria. All were conducted in laboratories. Given the diversity in the included studies, we did not conduct a meta-analysis and instead report the findings narratively. The only intervention explored in RCTs was capitalization of selected letters ("Tall Man"), for which we found limited efficacy and no consensus.

CONCLUSIONS

Tall Man lettering is a marginally effective intervention to reduce LASA errors, with a number of caveats. We suggest that Tall Man gives rise to a "quasi-placebo effect", whereby a user derives more benefit from Tall Man lettering if they are aware of its purpose.

Neural Representation in Visual Word Form Area during Word Reading

The visual word form area (VWFA) has been consistently identified as a crucial structure in visual word processing. Nevertheless, it is controversial whether the VWFA represents external visual information (e.g., case information) of visual words. To address that question, we functionally localized VWFA at the group level (gVWFA) and at the individual level (iVWFA), and used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to explore the information representation in the VWFA during an implicit reading task (i.e., a passive viewing task). Univariate activation analysis revealed that participants showed stronger activations for uppercase English words compared to lowercase ones in the VWFA. MVPA further revealed that the classifier trained based on lowercase words versus letter strings significantly distinguished uppercase words versus letter strings in the iVWFA, while that trained based on lowercase words versus uppercase words distinguished lowercase letter strings versus uppercase letter strings neither in the gVWFA nor in the iVWFA. These results suggest that the VWFA does not represent case information, but represents case-independent linguistic information. Our findings elaborate the function in the VWFA and support the VWFA hypothesis.

Does CaSe-MiXinG disrupt the access to lexico-semantic information?

Mixed-case WoRdS disrupt performance in word recognition tasks and sentence reading. There is, however, a controversial issue around this finding as the hindered performance could be related to impoverished lexico-semantic access or to lack of visual familiarity. The present experiments aim to examine whether there is a genuine mixed-case effect during lexico-semantic access or whether the effect is driven by a visual familiarity bias (i.e., lack of familiarity may induce a bias toward "no" responses in word/nonword decisions). Participants were presented with same-case vs. mixed-case items in a word/nonword discrimination task (lexical decision) and in a task that requires access to semantic information (semantic categorization). In lexical decision, responses were faster and more accurate to same-case words than to mixed-case words, whereas the nonwords showed the opposite pattern. In two semantic categorization experiments, we failed to find any signs of a case-mixing effect for words. Therefore, the case-mixing effect in word recognition is not due to an impoverished access to lexico-semantic information but rather to lack of visual familiarity.

Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?

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.