Detection errors on the word the: evidence for reading units larger than letters.
In four experiments, subjects read 100-word passages and circled instances of the letter t. Subjects missed a disproportionate number of ts in the word the. Evidence was provided against explanations of this effect involving the location and pronunciation of the t in the and against an explanation in terms of the redundancy of the. Rather the high frequency of the appeared to be critical, and it was suggested that high-frequency words are read in terms of units larger than the letter.
D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception