Transfer of repetition effects across changes in the context and the surface form of words being read aloud is used to diagnose the degree of abstraction at which perceptual encoding operations take place during reading. Complete transfer is observed for changes from textually coherent to randomly scrambled word order and vice versa in Experiment 1 and for changes from typed to handwritten surface form and vice versa in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 extends the finding of complete transfer across changes in surface form to texts composed of unfamiliar pseudowords, showing that the abstraction effects of the previous experiment do not require lexical familiarity for their occurrence. Experiment 4 further extends this finding to a situation in which readers explicitly expect surface form to remain the same. The results are consistent with a perceptual system in which encoding operations are (a) very abstract with respect to properties of surface form and (h) relatively independent both of higher order comprehension processes, such as syntactic parsing and proposition formation, and of attended expectations about surface properties over which the operations project their categorizations of stimuli. We argue that the perceptual abstraction observed in these experiments depends on overlearned encoding operations established by reading many different instances of the typographical variations typical of a particular writing system.

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