Letter position information and printed word perception: the relative-position priming constraint.

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the target "apricot"). Priming effects were not influenced by whether or not absolute, length-dependent position was respected (e.g., "a-ric-t" vs. "arict"/"ar-i-ct"). Position of overlap of relative-position primes (e.g., apric-apricot; ricot-apricot; arict-apricot) was found to have little influence on the size of priming effects, particularly in conditions (i.e., 33 ms prime durations) where there was no evidence for phonological priming. The results constrain possible schemes for letter position coding.

[1]  K. Forster,et al.  Masked priming with graphemically related forms: Repetition or partial activation? , 1987 .

[2]  M. Ahissar,et al.  Are phonological effects fragile? The effect of luminance and exposure duration on form priming and phonological priming , 2003 .

[3]  K. Rayner.  Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[4]  J Grainger,et al.  Effects of Orthography are Independent of Phonology in Masked form Priming , 1994, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[5]  K. Forster,et al.  REPETITION PRIMING AND FREQUENCY ATTENUATION IN LEXICAL ACCESS , 1984 .

[6]  J. Grainger,et al.  Phonology and Orthography in Visual Word Recognition: Evidence from Masked Non-Word Priming , 1992, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[7]  C. Whitney.  How the brain encodes the order of letters in a printed word: The SERIOL model and selective literature review , 2001, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[8]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Understanding normal and impaired word reading: computational principles in quasi-regular domains. , 1996, Psychological review.

[9]  Colin J. Davis,et al.  The self-organising lexical acquisition and recognition (SOLAR) model of visual word recognition. , 2001 .

[10]  J. Grainger,et al.  Masked cross-modal morphological priming: Unravelling morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic influences in early word recognition , 2005 .

[11]  J Grainger,et al.  The role of letter identity and letter position in orthographic priming , 1999, Perception & psychophysics.

[12]  Kevin Diependaele,et al.  Masked repetition and phonological priming within and across modalities. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[13]  Stephen Grossberg,et al.  A Theory of Human Memory: Self-Organization and Performance of Sensory-Motor Codes, Maps, and Plans , 1982 .

[14]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  A study of relative-position priming with superset primes. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  Victoria A. Fromkin,et al.  Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey: The mental lexicon , 1988 .

[16]  Boris New,et al.  Une base de données lexicales du français contemporain sur internet: LEXIQUE , 2001 .

[17]  James L. McClelland,et al.  An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. , 1981 .

[18]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  Levels of representation, co-ordinate frames, and unilateral neglect , 1990 .

[19]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  Temporal Integration of Information in Orthographic Priming , 1999 .

[20]  P. Holcomb,et al.  Event-related potential indices of masked repetition priming. , 2003, Psychophysiology.

[21]  Sharon M. Thomas,et al.  Assessing the importance of letter pairs in initial, exterior, and interior positions in reading. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[22]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Visual and Phonological Codes in Letter and Word Recognition: Evidence from Incremental Priming , 2000, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[23]  J. Grainger,et al.  Letter position coding in printed word perception: Effects of repeated and transposed letters , 2004 .

[24]  James L. McClelland,et al.  A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. , 1989, Psychological review.

[25]  Matthew Flatt,et al.  PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers , 1993 .

[26]  C. Dunnett.  A Multiple Comparison Procedure for Comparing Several Treatments with a Control , 1955 .

[27]  S. Lupker,et al.  Can CANISO activate CASINO? Transposed-letter similarity effects with nonadjacent letter positions ☆ , 2004 .

[28]  M Coltheart,et al.  DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. , 2001, Psychological review.

[29]  Paul W. B. Atkins,et al.  Models of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-processing approaches. , 1993 .

[30]  Manuel Perea,et al.  Transposed-Letter Confusability Effects in Masked Form Priming , 2003 .

[31]  M Coltheart,et al.  Basic processes in reading: computation of abstract letter identities. , 1984, Canadian journal of psychology.

[32]  G. McConkie,et al.  Integrating information across eye movements , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[33]  G. Humphreys,et al.  The Use of Abstract Graphemic Information in Lexical Access , 1981 .

[34]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  Modeling letter position coding in printed word perception , 2004 .

[35]  M. Sigman,et al.  Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.9 No.7 July 2005 The neural code for written words: a proposal , 2022 .

[36]  Albrecht W. Inhoff,et al.  Integrating information across fixations during reading: The use of orthographic bodies and of exterior letters. , 1995 .

[37]  J. Bowers.  Masked priming: State of the Art , 2003 .

[38]  J. Grainger,et al.  Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition , 2005, Psychological science.

[39]  Albrecht W. Inhoff,et al.  Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Are word access codes used to integrate lexical information across interword fixations? , 1989 .

[40]  A. Jacobs,et al.  Localist connectionist approaches to human cognition , 1998 .

[41]  Kenneth I Forster,et al.  DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy , 2003, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[42]  Jeffrey S Bowers,et al.  What do letter migration errors reveal about letter position coding in visual word recognition? , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[43]  J Grainger,et al.  Masked partial-word priming in visual word recognition: effects of positional letter frequency. , 1993, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[44]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  On the Time Course of Visual Word Recognition: An Event-related Potential Investigation using Masked Repetition Priming , 2006, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[45]  Barbara J. Juhasz,et al.  Distinct Subsystems for the Parafoveal Processing of Spatial and Linguistic Information during Eye Fixations in Reading , 2003, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[46]  A Pollatsek,et al.  On the use of counterbalanced designs in cognitive research: a suggestion for a better and more powerful analysis. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[47]  Kristi A. Kiyonaga,et al.  The time course of orthographic and phonological code activation. , 1993, Psychological science.

[48]  J. Grainger,et al.  Does the huamn mnid raed wrods as a wlohe? , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[49]  Philip T Quinlan,et al.  Orthographic processing in visual word identification , 1990, Cognitive Psychology.