Dissociating congruence effects in letters versus shapes: Kanji and kana

Jincho, Nobuyuki; Lachmann, Thomas; Leeuwen, Cees van

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.05.006

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In contrast, literates of the same ethnicity differentiated between letters and non-letters, just as groups of skilled readers of other ethnicities did (Lachmann and van Leeuwen, 2004; Jincho et al, 2008). They also showed a letter superiority effect that, not surprisingly, is absent in illiterates: letters are processed faster than non-letters and produce opposite congruence effects: positive congruence effects for non-letters, negative congruence effects for letters.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Lachmann¹,

Khera²,

Srinivasan³

et al. 2012

Front. Evol. Neurosci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Learning to read puts evolutionary established speech and visual object recognition functions to novel use. As we previously showed, this leads to particular rearrangements and differentiations in these functions, for instance the habitual preference for holistic perceptual organization in visual object recognition and its suppression in perceiving letters. We performed the experiment in which the differentiation between holistic non-letter processing and analytic letter processing in literates was originally shown (van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004) with illiterate adults. The original differentiation is absent in illiterates; they uniformly showed analytic perception for both letters and non-letters. The result implies that analytic visual perception is not a secondary development resulting from learning to read but, rather, a primary mode of perceptual organization on a par with holistic perception.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Since mean RTs of illiterates were nearly entirely outside the range of those of normal adult readers (Lachmann and van Leeuwen, 2004, 2008b; van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004; Jincho et al, 2008), ANOVAs were run for each group separately.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Lachmann¹,

Khera²,

Srinivasan³

et al. 2012

Front. Evol. Neurosci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similarly, Nakamura and colleagues reported a difference in the VWFA for Japanese Kana (a regular syllable script) and Kanji (a logographic script) in native Japanese [41], as it has been shown that Kana is more frequently used than Kanji [42]. However, it has also been suggested that compared with Kana, the more holistic processing of Kanji may have contributed to the observed differences [43].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Chinese and Korean Characters Engage the Same Visual Word Form Area in Proficient Early Chinese-Korean Bilinguals

et al. 2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A number of recent studies consistently show an area, known as the visual word form area (VWFA), in the left fusiform gyrus that is selectively responsive for visual words in alphabetic scripts as well as in logographic scripts, such as Chinese characters. However, given the large difference between Chinese characters and alphabetic scripts in terms of their orthographic rules, it is not clear at a fine spatial scale, whether Chinese characters engage the same VWFA in the occipito-temporal cortex as alphabetic scripts. We specifically compared Chinese with Korean script, with Korean script serving as a good example of alphabetic writing system, but matched to Chinese in the overall square shape. Sixteen proficient early Chinese-Korean bilinguals took part in the fMRI experiment. Four types of stimuli (Chinese characters, Korean characters, line drawings and unfamiliar Chinese faces) were presented in a block-design paradigm. By contrasting characters (Chinese or Korean) to faces, presumed VWFAs could be identified for both Chinese and Korean characters in the left occipito-temporal sulcus in each subject. The location of peak response point in these two VWFAs were essentially the same. Further analysis revealed a substantial overlap between the VWFA identified for Chinese and that for Korean. At the group level, there was no significant difference in amplitude of response to Chinese and Korean characters. Spatial patterns of response to Chinese and Korean are similar. In addition to confirming that there is an area in the left occipito-temporal cortex that selectively responds to scripts in both Korean and Chinese in early Chinese-Korean bilinguals, our results show that these two scripts engage essentially the same VWFA, even at the level of fine spatial patterns of activation across voxels. These results suggest that similar populations of neurons are engaged in processing the different scripts within the same VWFA in early bilinguals.

show abstract

“…The flanker studies, in which the visual angle was between 2.6 and 3.5 for the targets, and between 5.2 and 8° for their irrelevant surroundings ( Lachmann and van Leeuwen, 2004 , 2007 , 2008a , b ; van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004 ; Jincho et al, 2008 ), offer insight in the question why normal readers would adopt an analytic mode for letter discrimination in reading. In distinguishing letters, component features are important rather than their global shape distinctions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Letters in the forest: global precedence effect disappears for letters but not for non-letters under reading-like conditions

et al. 2014

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Normally skilled reading involves special processing strategies for letters, which are habitually funneled into an abstract letter code. On the basis of previous studies we argue that this habit leads to the preferred usage of an analytic strategy for the processing of letters, while non-letters are preferably processed via a holistic strategy. The well-known global precedence effect (GPE) seems to contradict to this assumption, since, with compound, hierarchical figures, including letter items, faster responses are observed to the global than to the local level of the figure, as well as an asymmetric interference effect from global to local level. We argue that with letters these effects depend on presentation conditions; only when they elicit the processing strategies automatized for reading, an analytic strategy for letters in contrast to non-letters is to be expected. We compared the GPE for letters and non-letters in central viewing, with the global stimulus size close to the functional visual field in whole word reading (6.5° of visual angle) and local stimuli close to the critical size for fluent reading of individual letters (0.5° of visual angle). Under these conditions, the GPE remained robust for non-letters. For letters, however, it disappeared: letters showed no overall response time advantage for the global level and symmetric congruence effects (local-to-global as well as global-to-local interference). We interpret these results as according to the view that reading is based on resident analytic visual processing strategies for letters.

show abstract

Dissociating congruence effects in letters versus shapes: Kanji and kana

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Chinese and Korean Characters Engage the Same Visual Word Form Area in Proficient Early Chinese-Korean Bilinguals

Letters in the forest: global precedence effect disappears for letters but not for non-letters under reading-like conditions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About