Orthographic regularity, positional frequency, and visual processing of letter strings.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that familiarity with the orthographic structure within a letter string can facilitate the processing of the component letters. The current research was directed at discovering the psychologically relevant properties of this structure. Two fundamental descriptions were independently varied in the construction of six-letter nonword strings. A probabilistic description based on the frequency of occurrence of letters in each position was factorially combined with a rule-governed description defined in terms of graphemic and phonological constraints. College sophomores and sixth-grade readers were asked to indicate whether or not a predesignaled target letter was present in these strings. For both groups of readers, orthographic regularity and summed positional frequency were found to have only a small facilitative effect on reaction time (RT). In contrast, RTs to say "no" increased dramatically with increases in the number of letters in the catch string that were physically similar to the target letter. In another experiment, the letter string was presented for a short duration, followed immediately by masking stimulus and then the target letter. College students indicated whether or not the target was present in the test string. Accuracy of performance was critically dependent on the orthographic regularity and summed positional frequencies of the letters in the test string. No effect of letter similarity was observed. The large differences that were observed between these two tasks were accounted for in terms of the stages of processing that are critical for performance in the tasks.The processes by which words are recog-and Levin (1975), every major treatise on nized during reading have concerned psy-reading has discussed this issue at length, chologists and educators for almost a cen-and generally concluded, as did Huey (1908/ tury. From Huey (1908/1968) to Gibson 1968), that "it is very difficult to draw final conclusions concerning visual perception in This research was carried out at the Wisconsin reading" (p. 102).

Letters and words in word identification

“…Wasthere a variation in the orthographic structure of the high-and low-frequency words or of the words and nonwords in these studies? Studies by Mason (1975) and Massaro, Venezky, and Taylor (1979) suggest that the transitional probability (TP) of letter sequence is an important variable in word identification. The Chambers and Forster (1975) study indicated no correlation between the response times and the TPs of the bigrams or the trigrams of the letter sequences.…”

Derived Stimulus Relations Produce Mediated and Episodic Priming

“…The stimuli utilized in the matching-to-sample and priming phases were primarily from Massaro, Venezky, & Taylor (1979). The stimuli were permutations derived from the most frequent 150 six-letter English words in Kucera and Francis (1967) and which met the following criteria: (a) they were orthographically regular; (b) they were pronounceable; (c) they contained common vowel and consonant spellings; and (d) they had no more than three letters for a medial consonant cluster, if one occurred.…”

The interaction of pronunciation rules and lexical representations in reading aloud

“…Because the stimuli were presented visually, it was necessary to control for variables likely to affect visual processing, and many researchers (see Carr, Posner, Pollatsek, &Snyder, 1979, andMassaro, Venezky, &Taylor, 1979) have argued that orthographic structure is one such variable. Although orthographic regularity was ensured by making all of the items legal English strings, additional control was imposed by equating conditions for average log bigram frequency (based on the counts of Mayzner & Tresselt, 1965).…”