title: Spatial representations of words and nonwords.
abstract: The first two experiments investigated whether the representations of words, besides being unitary, are also spatial in nature. Subjects were required to search for target letters in either five-letter words or five-letter nonwords. They were instructed to press the right-side key for one target and the left-side key for the other target. The center item of the letter string was always at fixation. Targets appeared one at a time, located at the second (left side) or the fourth (right side) position within the letter string. The results showed that: a) responses to targets within words were faster than responses to targets within nonwords (the word-superiority effect); b) responses to compatible stimulus-response pairings were faster than responses to incompatible stimulus-response pairings (the spatial compatibility, or, more precisely, the Simon effect); and c) in Experiment 2, left-side targets were responded to faster than right-side targets within nonwords (the left-right scanning effect). It was concluded that representations of both words and nonwords are spatial in nature. Experiment 3 was aimed at testing whether the spatial layout of the representations of words is always along the left-right horizontal dimension, regardless of the topographic transformation of the stimulus. The same words and nonwords used in the previous experiments were shown vertically and the subjects were required to make left-right discriminative responses to upper and lower target letters. The results showed the word-superiority effect but no spatial compatibility effects. It was concluded that the representation of a vertically presented word is vertically arranged.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Nicoletti
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Umiltà
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mapelli
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading