Why words are perceived more accurately than nonwords: Inference versus unitization.

Smith, Edward E.; Haviland, Susan E.

doi:10.1037/h0032146

Cited by 70 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The alternatives were such that if the presented stimulus was a word both alternatives would form a word. Thus, if the stimulus presented was the word "DOVE," the two alternatives for the first position letter might be "0" and "L." Reicher reasoned that this would eliminate the differential advantage of guessing for word over nonword stimuli.A similar finding was reported by Smith and Haviland (1972). Eliminating the advantage of redundancy by using the Reicher's forced choice technique, these authors found that letters embedded in words are chosen better than letters embedded in nonsense strings of letters, despite subject's knowledge of the rules generating the nonsense strings.…”

supporting

confidence: 64%

The word superiority effect: A comparison between restricted and unrestricted alternative set

Spector

Purcell

1977

Perception & Psychophysics

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Three experiments were conducted to investigate the word superiority effect (WSE) (Reicher, 1969). The first two experiments used mixed presentations of words and nonwords, and positional uncertainty of the critical letter. Experiment 1 used an unrestricted set of alternatives, while Experiment 2 used only two alternatives (R and L). Experiment 3 compared letter detection in nonwords with a restricted and unrestricted alternative set. WSE was found for both Experiments 1 and 2, at about the same level Experiment 3 showed superior performance when alternatives were known in advance. It was concluded that context has an effect on letter recognition even with prior knowledge of alternatives if the critical position is not known in advance. Some incompatibilities between the present results and those of other investigators in the field are discussed.The word superiority effect (WSE) refers to a finding initially reported by Reicher (1969) and by Wheeler (1970): when a subject has to identify a letter, he does better when the letter is embedded within a word than when it is embedded in a nonsense string of letters or presented alone. As stated above, the effect is not surprising, since when presented with a word the subject might guess the identity of the letter using the redundancy inherent in English words. However, the Reicher experimental technique attempted to eliminate this problem. Rather than identifying the critical letter, Reicher's subjects had to choose between two alternative letters, one of which was the critical letter. The alternatives were such that if the presented stimulus was a word both alternatives would form a word. Thus, if the stimulus presented was the word "DOVE," the two alternatives for the first position letter might be "0" and "L." Reicher reasoned that this would eliminate the differential advantage of guessing for word over nonword stimuli.A similar finding was reported by Smith and Haviland (1972). Eliminating the advantage of redundancy by using the Reicher's forced choice technique, these authors found that letters embedded in words are chosen better than letters embedded in nonsense strings of letters, despite subject's knowledge of the rules generating the nonsense strings. Aderman and Smith (1971), in a related finding, showed that letters embedded in spelling patterns are perceived better than letters embedded in unrelated strings. They further showed that this advantage of the spelling pattern depends on the

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supporting

confidence: 64%

The word superiority effect: A comparison between restricted and unrestricted alternative set

Spector

Purcell

1977

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…However, several arguments make this account implausible. (I) A number of studies of accuracy of tachistoscopic perception have failed to find any evidence of the postulated benefits of contextual constraints (Estes, 1975;Johnston, 1978;Smith & Haviland, 1972). (2) As noted above, there is no hint of a difference between pseudowords and single letters in the proportion of times a key letter was guessed when its paired stimulus was presented.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identity without form: Abstract representations of letters

Friedman

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

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Subjects viewed single letters and orthographically regular pseudowords in a tachistoscope at threshold duration. The pseudowords were either all of one case (upper or lower) or they were of mixed case. Letter identity I" A") and case judgments were required for one letter on each trial. It was found that letter identity was often reported correctly when case was reported incorrectly, even for letters whose upper-and lowercase forms are physically dissimilar le.g., G-g). This "case effect" was stronger for letters in pseudowords than for letters presented alone. It held across different type fonts, and it occurred even when the upperand lowercase letters were of different sizes (gEaT) and when the instructions to the subjects stressed the greater importance of case reports over identity reports. The results are consistent with the view that letter identification is an automatic process, the product of which is an abstract representation containing no information about physical form.The present investigation examines the representations upon which viewers base their responses when reporting tachistoscopically presented words and letters. One view is that orthographically regular stimuli are processed rapidly and automatically into an abstract representation on the basis of an initial letter identification process (Estes, 1975;McClelland, 1976). This representation leaves behind the visual features of letters; thus details of the type font (Adams, 1979) and letter thickness (Earhard, 1969) may be unavailable for conscious report. However, as McClelland points out, it is difficult to determine whether the inability to report such features indicates abstraction or simply a failure to perceive the features in the first place. The second possibility is quite likely in these instances, since neither type font nor line thickness contribute to the determination of letter identity.In contrast, in the experiments reported here the visual information in question is the total form or shape of the letter-information that must have been used to determine the letter's identity. If such information remains available, then viewers should be This investigation was carried out while the author was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, M.LT., Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was supported by NIH Training Grant NIH-5-TOI-GMOI064 and by grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Spencer Foundation to the Department of Psychology, M.LT. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by USPHS Fellowship 3-F32-NS06065 and USPHS Grant 07615. The author wishes to thank Mary C. Potter and James L. McClelland for their invaluable advice and James C. Johnston and William F. Ganong III for helpful comments and discussion. The results of Experiment I were presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, New York, 1976. Requests for reprints should be sent to Rhonda B. Friedman, Psychology 116B, Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center, 150 S. Huntington Ave., Boston, Massachusetts 02130. able to report o...

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“…However, the word advantage in visual perception can be maintained in the face of perfect knowledge of the stimulus set (Smith & Haviland, 1972) if the visual angle of the words is small enough (Purcell, Stanovich, & Spector, 1978).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception.

Ganong¹

1980

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

567

590

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To investigate the interaction in speech perception of auditory information and lexical knowledge (in particular, knowledge of which phonetic sequences are words), acoustic continua varying in voice onset time were constructed so that for each acoustic continuum, one of the two possible phonetic categorizations made a word and the other did not. For example, one continuum ranged between the word dash and the nonword task; another used the nonword dask and the word task. In two experiments, subjects showed a significant lexical effect-that is, a tendency to make phonetic categorizations that make words. This lexical effect was greater at the phoneme boundary (where auditory information is ambiguous) than at the ends of the continua. Hence the lexical effect must arise at a stage of processing sensitive to both lexical knowledge and auditory information.Linguistic context has long been known to aid and bias the identification of speech. For example, the identification of sequences of words in noise is substantially aided if the words form sentences (Miller, Heise, & Lichten, 1951). The phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970) shows that context can control the perception of individual segments : When a single phone of an utterance is replaced by a noise burst or a cough, a

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Why words are perceived more accurately than nonwords: Inference versus unitization.

Cited by 70 publications

References 9 publications

The word superiority effect: A comparison between restricted and unrestricted alternative set

The word superiority effect: A comparison between restricted and unrestricted alternative set

Identity without form: Abstract representations of letters

Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception.

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