On recognizing proper names: The orthographic cue hypothesis

Cross-sensory correspondences and symbolism in spoken and written language.

“…As Perea et al themselves demonstrate, however, information about letter case is not discarded, but is taken into account during word recognition (see also Seymour & Jack, 1978). This is consistent with Peressotti, Cubelli and Job's (2003) account of word reading and their finding that letter case is crucially important during the reading of proper names. As P. Walker & Hinkley (2003) Lewis and P. Walker (1989), the present study extends these notions to embrace the font in which a word appears as the carrier of incidential visual features that are not completely discarded during reading.…”

Explorations in the language of perception and the perception of language

“…Guided by a mathematical model, Jacobs et al carefully examine the inXuence of word-initial capitalized letters in two experiments using a perceptual identiWcation task and the 'variable viewing position' technique: German nouns and non-nouns, which are usually perceived with and, respectively, without initial letter capitalization, were tachistoscopically presented in upper-case, lower-case, or with initial capitalization. The results support the 'orthographic-cue' hypothesis (Peressotti, Cubelli & Job, 2003), suggesting that words are best recognized in the form in which they are most frequently perceived. Taken together, the data indicate that, in the course reading acquisition, abstract as well as case-and item-speciWc orthographic cues are learned and used for word recognition.…”

Case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency counts from large-scale English corpora

“…A salient illustration of case-sensitivity from experience is the proper name effect. In a series of lexical decision experiments, Peressotti, Cubelli, and Job (2003) found a consistent reaction time advantage for proper names that had the first letter capitalized, compared with common nouns and proper names with the first letter in lowercase. Since proper names are experienced with the first letter capitalized, the proper name effect provides further support for the importance of accounting for casesensitive frequency in experimental stimuli.…”