Do small visual angles produce a word superiority effect or differential lateral masking?

Abstract

Purcell, Stanovich, and Spector (1978) report that recognition of the center letter of the words APE, ARE, ACE, and AGE is superior to recognition of the same targets in the nonwords formed by the context letters V_H. Since a small set of predesignated targets was used and there was complete certainty about the location of the target letter, these results pose serious problems for three otherwise viable accounts for why word superiority effects (WSEs) are obtained in a variety of other paradigms. This series of experiments explores the possibility that the word advantages reported by Purcell et aI. have nothing to do with the lexical properties of the A_E display or the general phenomenon of word superiority, but they result from a fortuitous case of differential lateral masking. This reinterpretation is supported by five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 show that the A_E word advantages are anomalous in that the magnitude of the WSE obtained with these particular words is not contingent upon the presence of a patterned mask. Experiment 3 provides direct evidence for differential lateral masking by showing that digit recognition is poorer in the V_H than in the A_E frame. Experiments 4 and 5 show that the WSE obtained under these conditions does not generalize to a new set of words and nonwords that produce the same amount of lateral masking. It was concluded that a genuine WSE does not occur under the conditions tested by Purcell et al., and that, therefore, the WSE has not been shown to depend on visual angle.Letter recognition is usually better when a target is presented in a word compared with when it is presented either alone or in a sequence of orthographically irregular letters. Reicher's (1969) contribution to our understanding of this word superiority effect (WSE) was to control for response biases by forcing subjects to choose between two alternatives that did not change the lexical status of the test display. That is, on word trials both alternatives would form a word, whereas the incorrect alternative on non word trials would always form another nonword. Since word advantages occur with this control, it is clear that the WSE involves more than a simple bias to respond with a letter name that forms a word in the surrounding context. Subsequent tests of various hypotheses concerning the locus of the WSE have often sought to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for its occurSpecial thanks must go to Richard A. Ward, who maintained a cheerful and enthusiastic demeanor that was sure to sustain the motivation of our subjects, despite the fact that he changed . thousands of cards during the data collection phase of Experiments 1-4. Furthermore, Experiment 2 was his idea. We also thank Steve Burczak for assisting in the data collection of Experiment 3 and Jim Kiesel for collecting the data for Experiment 5. Earlier versions of this paper benefited from the comments of Dominic Massaro and the CIP group at NMSU, and the final product significantly reflects the concerns of an anonymous reviewer.

Word superiority in word detection

“…(Graphic factors also seem to account for the Purcell et a1. findings, as shown recently by Paap and Newsome, 1980. ) Taken together, the available evidence provides little support for the assertion that experience can facilitate the perception of letters within words (see, also, Krueger & Shapiro, 1979; Massaro, 1979).…”

Independence versus interference in the perceptual processing of letters

“…Several differences suggested themselves, such as the size and font of the letters, as well as the circular rather than horizontal, side-by-side arrangement of the letters. It should be noted that similar differences in stimulus parameters have been important in the study of other perceptual phenomena in cognitive psychology (e.g., Paap & Newsome, 1980;Purcell, Stanovich, & Spector, 1978).…”

A perceptual-confusion account of the WSE in the target search paradigm

“…It becomes only a fortuitouscoincidencethat the target letters formed words in the context of the less effective mask. With this reinterpretation in mind, we have recently conducted and reported (Paap & Newsome, 1980) …”