Are all letters really processed equally and in parallel? Further evidence of a robust first letter advantage

Abstract

This present study examined accuracy and response latency of letter processing as a function of position within a horizontal array. In a series of 4 Experiments, target-strings were briefly (33 ms for Experiment 1 to 3, 83 ms for Experiment 4) displayed and both forward and backward masked. Participants then made a two alternative forced choice. The two alternative responses differed just in one element of the string, and position of mismatch was systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, words of different lengths (from 3 to 6 letters) were presented in separate blocks. Across different lengths, there was a robust advantage in performance when the alternative response was different for the letter occurring at the first position, compared to when the difference occurred at any other position. Experiment 2 replicated this finding with the same materials used in Experiment 1, but with words of different lengths randomly intermixed within blocks. Experiment 3 provided evidence of the first position advantage with legal nonwords and strings of consonants, but did not provide any first position advantage for non-alphabetic symbols. The lack of a first position advantage for symbols was replicated in Experiment 4, where target-strings were displayed for a longer duration (83 ms). Taken together these results suggest that the first position advantage is a phenomenon that occurs specifically and selectively for letters, independent of lexical constraints. We argue that the results are consistent with models that assume a processing advantage for coding letters in the first position, and are inconsistent with the commonly held assumption in visual word recognition models that letters are equally processed in parallel independent of letter position.

Letter coding in visual word recognition: The impact of embedded words

“…That is, how might they be modified to reduce the impact of a final embedding relative to an initial embedding and avoid having the strongest interference arise from an outer embedding? One possibility would be to reduce the impact of the final letter relative to the initial letter, which would accord with recent results showing that letter visibility is greater in initial than final position (e.g., Marzouki & Grainger, 2014;Scaltritti & Balota, 2013). Within the spatial coding model (Davis, 2010) this could be incorporated by reducing the contribution of the letter-bank for final letters relative to the letter-bank for initial letters.…”

The first letter position effect in visual word recognition: The role of spatial attention.

“…The procedure closely replicated that used by Scaltritti and Balota (2013), which was modeled after the original Adelman et al (2010) paradigm. The experiment was conducted in individual testing rooms on PCs running E-prime 2.0 software.…”

“…Importantly, in the whole word design, a numerical advantage for the initial letter was still obtained in the Adelman et al results. This work was recently extended by Scaltritti and Balota (2013) who showed a consistent and robust first position advantage in both accuracy and reaction times using words that both varied in length (3 to 6 letters) and were randomly intermixed. Thus, from trial to trial, participants could not accurately predict where the start of the target string would appear.…”

“…Most prominently, the letter identification studies show an advantage for the central (and to a lesser extent, final letters) in addition to the initial letter, but only the first position shows a consistent advantage in the whole word paradigms (Scaltritti & Balota, 2013). These differing patterns raise the possibility that the two paradigms are measuring distinct processes.…”

Item-related Determinants of Cognate Guessing in Multilinguals

“…Participants may not only let guide their cognate guesses more by the consonantal skeleton of the Lx stimulus than by its vowels; they may also be particularly sensitive to word beginnings in cognate guessing tasks (Berthele, 2011;Möller, 2011;Möller & Zeevaert, 2010; see also Müller-Lancé, 2003; for L1-related findings pointing to a privileged role of word beginnings, see Broerse & Zwaan, 1966;Johnson & Eisler, 2012;Scaltritti & Balota, 2013). Here, too, the implication is that certain word parts contribute more to the perceived similarity of cognate relationships than do others.…”