Detection of intraword and interword letter repetition: a test of the word unitization hypothesis

Letter detection: A window to unitization and other cognitive processes in reading text

Experiments are reviewed that use the letter-detection task, in which subjects read text and circle target letters. Evidence is provided that the letter-detection task reveals the processing units used in reading text and is influenced as well by visual, phonetic, and a combination of semantic and syntactic factors. Specifically, it is shown that circling a target letter in a word depends on the familiarity of the word's visual configuration, the location of the word in the reader's visual field, the phonetic representation of the letter in the word, and a combination of the word's meaning and its grammatical function.

Influence of imaging ability on word transformation

In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in imaging ability affect visual word recognition. Poor and vivid imagers performed a naming task that involved nonreversed (e.g., JUMP) and reversed (e.g., PMUJ) words (Experiment 1). Poor and vivid imagers were also tested on a naming task that was controlled for verbal ability; all the words were reversed and presentation time was varied (Experiment 2). In both experiments, imaging ability interacted with task difficulty, suggesting that individual differences in imaging ability affect visual word recognition. Specifically, the present data suggest that poor imagers may be less efficient than vivid imagers at processing words analytically. The data are interpreted within a limited-capacity, hybrid, word recognition model, in which words can be processed as either word-level or letter-level codes.

Memory for objects and parts

Performance on whole comparisons of two whole objects was compared to that for partial comparisons of a whole object and a part. In particular, same-different comparisons were measured for sequential displays of two-dimensional line figures. The comparisons were analogous to those in the word priority paradigm (Johnson, 1975). The whole comparisons were found to be more accurate and faster than the partial comparisons. This whole advantage was also found for accuracy using a two-alternative forced-choice procedure. This effect was found for brief displays of a single object and for longer duration displays of two objects. It was also found for three different sets of line figures. In contrast, the whole advantage was not found for unconnected figures. These findings were interpreted in the context of hierarchical representations of objects and parts.