Tactual and name matching by blind children.
The hypothesis that letters can be matched on the basis of tactual physical features was tested in three experiments with blind Braille-reading children. Experiment I compared simultaneous matching of pairs of normal (S) and enlarged (E) format Braille letters. Under physical match instructions latencies for SS pairs were significantly faster than for other pairs, but matching EE pairs which compared two difficult letters under physical match instructions was no slower than matching SE or ES letters which compared one easy and one difficult letter under name match instructions. Experiment II showed that successive physical matching of SS and EE letters was significantly faster than name matching of ES and SE letters respectively. Experiment III tested successive matching with two types of altered format (X and Y) under instructions to judge whether pairs were the same letter. Latencies did not differ between XX and YY pairs, but each was significantly faster than either XY or YX pairs. The results were deemed to support the hypothesis.
D001766:Blindness; D002648:Child; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011930:Reaction Time; D014110:Touch; D014705:Verbal Behavior