The effects of alphabet and expertise on letter perception.

Wiley, Robert W.; Wilson, Colin; Rapp, Brenda

doi:10.1037/xhp0000213

Cited by 42 publications

(74 citation statements)

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“…Such confounds can in theory be controlled away, but this can be difficult with a small dataset (typically, the 26 or 52 letters of the Latin script). My re‐analysis of a classic study in letter perception (Podgorny & Garner, ) (see SM 2.10) detected a positive effect of letter cardinality on letter discrimination, in line with what previous studies have shown for the Latin and Arabic scripts (Fiset et al., ; Wiley et al., ). I also found a tendency for pure letters to be recognized faster than mixed ones (a feature that had not, to my knowledge, been investigated by previous studies).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…Not necessarily. A letter's saliency inside a script depends crucially on non-visual factors, such as its frequency of use (New & Grainger, 2011) or the reader's expertise with the script (Wiley, Wilson, & Rapp, 2016). Also, appealing visual features may be present in many different letters of the same script (for instance, many Latin letters include a left-hand-side vertical bar, which makes them confusable).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spontaneous Emergence of Legibility in Writing Systems: The Case of Orientation Anisotropy

Morin

2017

Cognitive Science

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Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal (vertical and horizontal) orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous Emergence of Legibility in Writing Systems: The Case of Orientation Anisotropy

Morin

2017

Cognitive Science

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“…By including visual (computed and stored), phonetic, and motoric similarity within the regression analyses, we were able to demonstrate—as would be predicted for purely symbolic representations—that this letter identity effect cannot be reduced to modality-specific visual, phonological or motor effects. This finding is also consistent with previous behavioral experimental evidence that cross-case letter forms share a common representation that is not modality-specific (e.g., Kinoshita & Kaplan, 2008; Wiley, Wilson, & Rapp, 2016). Consistent with the behavioral evidence of SLIs, Rothlein and Rapp (2014) provided neural data from an RSA analysis of fMRI data obtained from a letter decision task.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

The role of allograph representations in font-invariant letter identification.

Rothlein¹,

Rapp²

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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The literate brain must contend with countless font variants for any given letter. How does the visual system handle such variability? One proposed solution posits stored structural descriptions of basic letter shapes that are abstract enough to deal with the many possible font variations of each letter. These font-invariant representations, referred to as allographs in this paper, while frequently posited, have seldom been empirically evaluated. The research reported here helps to address this gap with two experiments that examine the possible influence of allograph representations on visual letter processing. In these experiments, participants respond to pairs of letters presented in an atypical font in two tasks—visual similarity judgments (Experiment 1) and same/different decisions (Experiment 2). By using Representational Similarity Analysis in conjunction with Linear Mixed Effect Models (RSA-LMEM) we show that the similarity structure of the responses to the atypical font is influenced by the predicted similarity structure of allograph representations even after accounting for font-specific visual shape similarity. Similarity due to symbolic (abstract) identity, name, and motor representations of letters are also taken into account providing compelling evidence for the unique influence of allograph representations in these tasks. These results provide support for the role of allograph representations in achieving font-invariant letter identification.

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“…This finding reveals that diacritical marks are encoded very rapidly-note that most letters in Arabic differ only in the number/location of diacritical marks. As Wiley et al (2016) showed, diacritical marks are the most relevant element to discriminating letters in Arabic.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Davis (2010) indicated, future implementations of these models should incorporate a more sophisticated letter coding scheme to encode letter representations from their visual features. Three of the main challenges for modelers are how to specify (1) the most diagnostic visual elements of letters (e.g., lines, curves, intersections, terminations) in the initial phases of word processing (see Blais et al, 2009;Rosa, Perea, & Enneson, 2016, for discussion); (2) how these visual features are dynamically weighted (see Wiley, Wilson, & Rapp, 2016) 3 ; and (3) how visual information is mapped onto abstract representations (see Grainger et al, 2016). Although a thorough description of these questions would be beyond the scope of this study, it is clear that additional research is needed to help determine the time course of visual similarity effects across letters in during written-word recognition.…”

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confidence: 99%

Is nevtral NEUTRAL? Visual similarity effects in the early phases of written-word recognition

Marcet

Perea

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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For simplicity, contemporary models of written-word recognition and reading have unspecified feature/letter levels-they predict that the visually similar substituted-letter nonword PEQPLE is as effective at activating the word PEOPLE as the visually dissimilar substituted-letter nonword PEYPLE. Previous empirical evidence on the effects of visual similarly across letters during written-word recognition is scarce and nonconclusive. To examine whether visual similarity across letters plays a role early in word processing, we conducted two masked priming lexical decision experiments (stimulus-onset asynchrony = 50 ms). The substituted-letter primes were visually very similar to the target letters (u/v in Experiment 1 and i/j in Experiment 2; e.g., nevtral-NEUTRAL). For comparison purposes, we included an identity prime condition (neutral-NEUTRAL) and a dissimilar-letter prime condition (neztral-NEUTRAL). Results showed that the similarletter prime condition produced faster word identification times than the dissimilar-letter prime condition. We discuss how models of written-word recognition should be amended to capture visual similarity effects across letters.Keywords Visual similarity . Masked priming . Lexical access Contemporary models of written-word recognition and reading in the Roman alphabet share the assumption that lexical access takes place on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations that are attained early in processing (Grainger, Dufau, & Ziegler, 2016). For simplicity's sake, these models assume a minimal/null role of visual similarity across letters in lexical access. Using the default parameters in the interactive activation model (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982) and its successors (e.g., spatial coding model; Davis, 2010), the visually similar substituted-letter prime PEQPLE is as effective at activating the word PEOPLE as the visually dissimilar substituted-letter prime PEYPLE (i.e., each condition yielded 60 processing cycles in masked priming lexical decision using Davis's, 2010, simulator)-note that O and Q share all features but one at the feature-letter level ( ), whereas O and Y do not share any features ( ). Likewise, other leading models posit that all letters are equally confusable (Bayesian reader model: Norris, 2006; Rationale model of eye movements in reading: Bicknell & Levy, 2010) so they would also predict similar word identification times for PEQPLE-PEOPLE and PEYPLE-PEOPLE.Nonetheless, if we assume that it takes time for the cognitive system to encode letter identity (or letter position), visual similarity across letters should have an impact in the early phases of word processing. Clearly, if PEQPLE-PEOPLE produces faster word recognition times than PEYPLE-PEOPLE, modelers should make an effort to develop in greater depth the underpinnings of the links between the feature and letter levels (i.e., this finding could be used as a benchmark for what is there to simulate). An analogy with letter position coding is relevant here: The slot-coding schemes in th...

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The effects of alphabet and expertise on letter perception.

Cited by 42 publications

References 70 publications

Spontaneous Emergence of Legibility in Writing Systems: The Case of Orientation Anisotropy

Spontaneous Emergence of Legibility in Writing Systems: The Case of Orientation Anisotropy

The role of allograph representations in font-invariant letter identification.

Is nevtral NEUTRAL? Visual similarity effects in the early phases of written-word recognition

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