Visual word recognition of three-letter words as derived from the recognition of the constituent letters

Abstract

Word recognition is one of the basic processes involved in reading. In this connection, a model for word recognition is proposed consisting of a perceptual and a decision stage. It is supposed that, in the perceptual stage, the formation of possible words proceeds by separate identification of each of the letters of the stimulus word in their positions. Letter perception is taken to be conditional on position because of interaction effects from neighboring letters. These effects are dependent on both position in the word and retinal eccentricity, which are of particular relevance in reading. The letter-based approach rests on the strong relationship between the results from single-letter recognition in meaningless strings and in real words. Next, in the decision step, the many alternatives generated in the perceptual stage are matched with a vocabulary of real words. It is supposed that the final choice from among the remaining words is made in accordance with the constant ratio rule; frequency effects are not separately incorporated in the model. All predictions of the model are generated by means of data from earlier experiments. Despite being not optimally suited for this purpose, the predictions compare favorably with responses in word-recognition experiments.In this article, a model is reported which describes the recognition of single words of three letters on the basis of the perception of the constituent letters. The model explains more fully the results of an earlier, extensive experiment on the recognition of letters and words carried out by Bouma (1973), which was part of a general investigation of visual processes involved in normal reading. In that experiment, an attempt was made to determine which attributes of words contribute to word recognition, particular attention being paid to explaining the role of initial and final letters of words. In addition, the experiment studied how the perception of a letter in a word related to that of the same letter in a meaningless string of the same length.Full implementation of the model made it necessary to run a supplementary experiment on the recognition of middle letters in meaningless strings. Having already obtained data on initial-and final-letter recognition (Bouma, 1973), quantitative predictions could then be attempted for words consisting of three letters. The experiments were restricted to parafoveally presented words. Under reading-like situations, fixated words can always be correctly perceived and consequently yield no information on the attributes mediating their perception. Since all words in a text shift under the reader's eye, all are at one or more times parafoveal.We owe many thanks to Mr. A. L. M. van Rens who collected the data in the experiments, to Mr. J. C. Jacobs for participating in the tedious phase of the model testing, and to Dr. C. Schiepers, who assisted in the compilation of the word vocabulary.Copyright © 1979 PsychonomicSociety, Inc. 12The manner in which the perception of letters operates in word recognition, according to th...

The effects of perceptual condition on proofreading for misspellings

“…Perhaps readers are able to adopt such a strategy only when they can use top-down contextual information as well as bottomup featural information in making their identifications. Such contextual information was clearly available in the prose passage used in the present study but was absent from, or minimal in, previous studies of alphabetic confusions, which involved the presentation of single letters (e.g., Townsend, 1971), letter pairs (e.g., Podgorny & Garner, 1979), or short words (e.g., Bouwhuis & Bouma, 1979). Furthermore, such a strategy may be evident only when subjects view more than one letter at a time, just as it has recently been found (see Healy, Oliver, & McNamara, Note 1) that letterdetection errors occur predominantly in common words only when more than one word can be seen at once.…”

The effects of visual similarity on proofreading for misspellings

“…Although asymmetries have been found in some of the previous studies of alphabetic confusions (e.g., Garner & Haun, 1978;Gilmore, Hersh, Cararnazza, & Griffin, 1979;Lindsay & Norman, 1977;Tversky, 1977), they have not been consistently found and have not always taken this form. An important difference between Experiment 1 of the present study and most of the earlier studies of alphabetic confusions is that single letters (e.g., Townsend, 1971), letter pairs (e.g., Podgomy & Garner, 1979), or short words (e.g., Bouwhuis & Bouma, 1979) were presented in the earlier studies, whereas letters were presented in a normal prose context in Experiment 1. To my knowledge, the only other proofreading experiment aimed at studying alphabetic confusions was the one by Holbrook (1978), who did report effects of visual similarity but did not discuss asymmetries.…”

Response latency and accuracy in visual word recogniton

“…Quantitative contributions can only beelucidated in a formal word recognition model (for threeletter words, see Bouwhuis & Bouma, 1979). We adopted the information processing approach and assumed independent contributions of perceptual and linguistic factors.…”