The role of orthographic and phonotactic rules in perceiving letter patterns.
Three experiments examined the role of orthographic and phonotactic rules in the tachistoscopic recognition of letter strings. Experiment 1 showed that the presence of a vowel or multiletter spelling patterns facilitates perceptual accuracy. To account for these results a model was proposed in which an input string is first parsed into syllablelike units, which are then recorded into speech. It was demonstrated that the perceptual accuracy for a string is correlated with the number of recoding steps needed to convert that string into speech. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this recoding  process can predict perceptibility differences among strings with varying numbers of phonotactic violations, and Experiment 3 assessed some of the specific assumptions of the recoding process.
D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011932:Reading; D013060:Speech; D014796:Visual Perception