Word shape's in poor shape for the race to the lexicon.

Kenneth R. Paap · Sandra L. Newsome · Ronald W. Noel

141 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance

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Reading and Literacy Development Visual perception and processing mechanisms Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

Current models of fluent reading often assume that fast and automatic word recognition involves the use of a supraletter feature corresponding to the envelope or shape of the word when it is printed in lowercase. The advantages of mixed case over pure case and of pure lowercase over pure uppercase have often been taken as evidence favoring the word-shape hypothesis. Alternative explanations for these phenomena are offered. Experiment 1 shows that previous demonstrations of word-shape effects during proofreading are better described as individual letter effects. Experiments 2-4 explore the possibility that word shape facilitates lexical access through uncertainty reduction. In all three experiments performance on words with rare shapes is compared to those with common shapes. There were no effects of shape frequency in either tachistoscopic recognition or lexical-decision tasks. This was true regardless of the degree to which the visual shape cue was supplemented by the nonvisual factors of familiarity and expectancy. Possible reasons why fluent readers ignore word shape are discussed within the framework of a model that assumes that automatic word recognition is mediated by the activation of abstract letter identities.

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References

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2000Unitization during category learning.2005Text Legibility and the Letter Superiority Effect 2008Features for Identification of Uppercase and Lowercase Letters 1985Reading rotated words.1998The effects of word frequency for Japanese Kana and Kanji words in naming and lexical decision: Can the dual-route model save the lexical-selection account?1989Repetition and reading: Perceptual encoding mechanisms are very abstract but not very interactive.

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