Don't words come easy? A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

Starrfelt, Randi; Petersen, Anders; Vangkilde, Signe

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00519

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In a recent study of young normal subjects, using the same two experimental paradigms, we observed a significant word superiority effect in both naming and visual processing (Starrfelt, Petersen, & Vangkilde, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Using the same tasks and stimuli with normal readers, we have recently shown that the WSE can be revealed both in the naming and in the perception task (Starrfelt, Petersen, & Vangkilde, 2013). With the present study we investigate whether the word superiority effect is eliminated or reversed in patients with pure alexia, and whether abnormal performance is differentially reflected in the naming task or the perceptual (accuracy-based) task.…”

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confidence: 89%

“…Experiments 1A and 1B were originally developed in an attempt to test the word superiority effect within the framework of TVA and were run with a sample of undergraduate students (Starrfelt, Petersen, & Vangkilde, 2013). This group consisted of 21 undergraduate students (6 male; mean age 23 years, range 19-36) at the University of Copenhagen, who participated in the study for course credit.…”

Section: Control Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The effect is typically found in experiments where stimuli are presented briefly and then masked, followed by either a forced choice or a free report task. Typical word superiority experiments use words and nonwords as stimuli (see Johnston, 1981;McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), but the effect may also be found when comparing performance with words to performance with single letters (Jordan & Bevan, 1994;Starrfelt, Petersen, & Vangkilde, 2013).…”

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confidence: 95%

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From word superiority to word inferiority: Visual processing of letters and words in pure alexia

Habekost¹,

Petersen²,

Behrmann³

et al. 2014

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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Visual processing and naming of individual letters and short words were investigated in four patients with pure alexia. To test processing at different levels, the same stimuli were studied across a naming task and a visual perception task. The normal word superiority effect was eliminated in both tasks for all patients, and this pattern was more pronounced in the more severely affected patients. The relationship between performance with single letters and words was, however, not straightforward: One patient performed within the normal range on the letter perception task, while being severely impaired in letter naming and word processing, and performance with letters and words was dissociated in all four patients, with word reading being more severely impaired than letter recognition. This suggests that the word reading deficit in pure alexia may not be reduced to an impairment in single letter perception.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

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confidence: 89%

Section: Control Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 95%

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From word superiority to word inferiority: Visual processing of letters and words in pure alexia

Habekost¹,

Petersen²,

Behrmann³

et al. 2014

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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“…Starrfelt et al (2013) explored the word superiority effect, which refers to the observation that when written stimuli are degraded by noise or brief presentation, letters in words are reported more accurately than single letters and letters embedded in non-words. With a novel combination of psychophysics and mathematical modeling, they showed that word superiority is due to single words being simply processed faster than single letters (at least for simple short words).…”

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confidence: 99%

What makes written words so special to the brain

2015

Frontiers Research Topics

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Reading is an integral part of life in today's information-driven societies. How the human brain sees and processes words is the focus of this ebook. It includes a collection of 22 papers that illustrate current issues in the neurobiology and psychophysics of word processing. Using varieties of behavioral tests and neuroimaging techniques, they investigated word processing mechanisms across different alphabetic and logographic writing systems, such as English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, French or German. Each paper provides useful literature reviews, methodological developments and a host of novel findings that will inspire future investigations into the neural systems that support reading.Several behavioral, fMRI and ERP studies investigated how word-likeness modulated the underlying cognitive and neural processing. The fMRI studies focused on many regions of the reading system, in particular a region in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex known as the visual word form area (VWFA), whereas the ERP studies featured prominently the N1/N170 component around 200 ms post-stimulus. Participants were mainly healthy skilled readers, although a few studies have also looked at reading in dyslexic, autistic, or congenitally deaf subjects. Ludersdorfer et al. (2013) investigated how the VWFA responds to visual and auditory stimuli that differed in their word-likeness. VWFA activation decreased for visual stimuli from false-fonts over pseudowords to words, presumably reflecting more efficient processing of familiar words. In contrast, auditory stimuli lead to a general deactivation in visual areas for all stimuli, except for the VWFA where deactivation was spared for word and pseudoword stimuli, presumably due to modulation by linguistic information. Deng et al. (2013) used two cross-modal tasks, phonological retrieval of visual words and orthographic retrieval of auditory words, to examine the unimodal and multimodal regions for logographic language processing. The VWFA responded exclusively to visual inputs, whereas an adjacent region in the left inferior temporal gyrus showed comparable activation for both visual and auditory inputs. A role of the VWFA in integrating visual and auditory processes is also suggested by McNorgan et al. (2013) who reported correlations between a behavioral phonemic awareness task (phoneme elision) and neural activation in an audiovisual condition in typically developing children. No such correlations were found in children with reading disability, nor in any of the groups for unimodal stimuli.Using ERP, an inverse word-like effect was also found for single letters by Herdman and Takai (2013), who reported an increased and delayed N1 for pseudoletters than letters, which was not modulated by attention. As studies using entire words typically report a reversed effect, this may suggest that processing single letters differs from processing letter strings and that early orthographic processing of letters is largely automatic. Hasko et al. (2013) not only showed a positive word-like effect i...

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Starrfelt

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Don't words come easy? A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

Cited by 20 publications

References 43 publications

From word superiority to word inferiority: Visual processing of letters and words in pure alexia

From word superiority to word inferiority: Visual processing of letters and words in pure alexia

What makes written words so special to the brain

Pure Alexia

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