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)

Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

Experiments tested the predictions that words are perceived more accurately in strongly constraining word contexts than in weakly constraining word contexts, and that a strong perceptual advantage would be present for letters in words vs. letters alone or in unrelated-letter strings. Several alternative theories of word perception are discussed.…

In this study, eight groups of kindergarten children were trained to discriminate position and order differences in verbal and nonverbal item sequences in the context of a matching task or an associative learning task or both. Transfer was measured by having the subjects sight learn a list of words contrasting in position and order. Subsequently,…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…