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Shaping the precision of letter position coding by varying properties of a writing system

Lally, C; Taylor, JSH; Lee, CH; Rastle, K; (2020) Shaping the precision of letter position coding by varying properties of a writing system. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience , 35 (3) pp. 374-382. 10.1080/23273798.2019.1663222. Green open access

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Abstract

There is substantial debate around the nature of letter position coding in reading. Research on a variety of Indo-European languages suggests uncertainty in position coding; for example, readers perceive transposed-letter stimuli (jugde) as similar to their base words (judge). However, these effects are not apparent for all languages. We developed a powerful new method to delineate how specific properties of a writing system shape the representation of letter position. Two groups of 24 adults learned to read novel words printed in artificial scripts. One group learned a dense orthography (i.e. with many anagrams) and one group learned a sparse orthography (i.e. no anagrams). Following four days of training, participants showed a larger transposed-letter effect in the sparse orthography than in the dense orthography. These results challenge existing models of orthographic processing in reading, and support the claim that orthographic representations are shaped by the nature of the writing system.

Type: Article
Title: Shaping the precision of letter position coding by varying properties of a writing system
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1663222
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1663222
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: orthography, writing systems, transposed letter, letter coding, artificial language learning
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Language and Cognition
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10086387
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