EXPRESS: Orthographic and feature-level contributions to letter identification

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/)

Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience

AbstractEnglish spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers' sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this variation. Specifically, we found consistent correlations between readers' sensitivity to cues and their performance on language tasks (reading, spelling, and author recognition tests) suggesting that reading experience is critical for assimilating spelling-to-meaning regularity from written language. Further, we identified characteristics that may be important for the learning and exploitation of orthographic cues that are related to the nature of their function and use in context