It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming…

We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several "nonaligned" vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., ??? <e:fn> is…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., "R" in "propoint" or "filmure") or…

In lexical decision, to date few studies in English have found a reliable pseudohomophone priming advantage with orthographically similar primes (the "klip-plip effect"; Frost, Ahissar, Gotesman, & Tayeb, 2003; see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006, for a review). On the basis of the Bayseian reader model of lexical decision (Norris,…

The present experiment supports the hypothesis that the letter is the basic perceptual unit in letter, nonword, and word identification. (Author)

Both fourth-grade children and adult Ss searched faster for target letters through common words than nonwords (scrambled collections of letters), through third-order pseudowords than nonwords. (Editor)

The hypothesis that word context reduces visual rather than acoustic confusion between possible targets was tested in a series of experiments. All involved tachistoscopic presentation of letter strings followed by a pattern mask. Data from eight college students showed that target letters that are confusable only visually and acoustically…

This study was designed to provide evidence concerning hemispheric independence in the visual modality of children and adults. Words and letters were shown either singly or in pairs. Hemispheric independence occurred more frequently among children when letters, as opposed to words, were shown. Results are discussed in terms of developmental models…

A study investigated the size of the perceptual span within which adults use visual information to distinguish among letters as they read. The eye movements of fifteen college students were monitored as they read passages from a cathode-ray tube. On occasional fixations, letters in specified visual regions were replaced by other letters. The…

In this study, the author elucidated whether reading experience continues to contribute to word recognition skills in readers with well-internalized reading skills. The participants performed consecutive same or different judgments regarding the identicalness of letters, words, and pseudohomophones. For a more detailed examination of how increased…

Second and fourth graders and college students categorized one- and two-syllable words. Categorization response times for second graders were related to the number of letters in one-syllable words. Second and fourth graders had longer categorization times than college students for four-letter, two-syllable words. (BC)

Twenty English-Japanese bilingual subjects were given the following reading tasks: timed, silent reading of passages in English and Japanese followed by comprehension tests and recognition of tachistoscopic presentations of twenty words in each language. The amount of reading the subjects had done in English and Japanese was assessed in an…