The ability to coordinate serial processing of multiple items is crucial for fluent reading but is known to be impaired in dyslexia. To investigate this impairment, we manipulated the orthographic and phonological similarity of adjacent letters online as dyslexic and nondyslexic readers named letters in a serial naming (RAN) task. Eye movements…

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram. In one condition, it…

Secondary task performance was used to evaluate the attentional demands of encoding the first letter in a sequential letter-match task. Unlike earlier studies, comparing secondary task performance between two primary task conditions indicated that letter encoding involves attention. Performance during the intertrial interval varied with subjects'…

In three experiments, this study addressed two basic questions about the detection of multiletter patterns: (1) How is the detection of a multiletter pattern related to the detection of its individual components? (2) How is the detection of a sequence of letters influenced by the observer's familiarity with that sequence? (Author/BW)

In four experiments, college students were presented with lists of either Armenian or English letters on a tachistoscope. The data indicate that extensive practice may be a necessary condition for capacity-free processing but may not be a necessary condition for involuntary processing. (Author/RD)

Reaction time and accuracy do not always reflect the same perceptual processes; therefore, the convergence of reaction time with accuracy within the context of a specific information processing model should be demonstrated empirically rather than assumed a priori. (Author/PN)

Two strings of letters were presented. Subjects were instructed to indicate whether the second string contained the same elements as the first, regardless of position. Reaction time increased with the number of positions that the letters were displaced. Results indicate that order may be an important factor in retrieval from memory. (Author/BW)

Effects of target-noise similarity on the ability to discriminate between two target letters were investigated. Performance was low when the noise letter shared the same name as the target. Thus, interletter interference effects cannot be explained in terms of inhibition between visual features. A "cognitive masking" hypothesis is proposed.…

Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. In these experiments, either familiar or non-familiar primes produced significant amounts of interference even when subjects were trying to ignore the visual input. Early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource…

Familiar letter sequences in noncued portions of a tachistoscopic display were shown to reduce accuracy of partial report. Findings suggest that familiarity may automatically direct attentional resources to a particular spatial region. Such attentional capture may be disruptive if the material is presented at another location. (Author/RD)

Three experiments report additional evidence that it is a mistake to account for all interletter effects solely in terms of sensory variables. These experiments attest to the importance of structural variables such as retina location, array size, and ordinal position. (Author/PN)