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EXPRESS: Orthographic and feature-level contributions to letter identification

Lally, Clare; Rastle, Kathy; (2022) EXPRESS: Orthographic and feature-level contributions to letter identification. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 10.1177/17470218221106155. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Word recognition is facilitated by primes containing visually similar letters (dentjst-dentist, Marcet & Perea, 2017), suggesting that letter identities are encoded with initial uncertainty. Orthographic knowledge also guides letter identification, as readers are more accurate at identifying letters in words compared to pseudowords (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970). We investigated how higher-level orthographic knowledge and low-level visual feature analysis operate in combination during letter identification. We conducted a Reicher-Wheeler task to compare readers' ability to discriminate between visually similar and dissimilar letters across different orthographic contexts (words, pseudowords, and consonant strings). Orthographic context and visual similarity had independent effects on letter identification, and there was no interaction between these factors. The magnitude of these effects indicated that higher-level orthographic information plays a greater role than lower-level visual feature information in letter identification. We propose that readers use orthographic knowledge to refine potential letter candidates while visual feature information is accumulated. This combination of higher-level knowledge and low-level feature analysis may be essential in permitting the flexibility required to identify visual variations of the same letter (e.g. N-n) whilst maintaining enough precision to tell visually similar letters apart (e.g. n-h). These results provide new insights on the integration of visual and linguistic information and highlight the need for greater integration between models of reading and visual processing. This study was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. Pre-registration, stimuli, instructions, trial-level data, and analysis scripts are openly available (https://osf.io/p4q9u/).

Type: Article
Title: EXPRESS: Orthographic and feature-level contributions to letter identification
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/17470218221106155
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221106155
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: letter identification, orthographic processing, reading, visual processing, visual word recognition
UCL classification: 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 > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149925
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