title: The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition.
abstract: Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in casino, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter spacing value relative to the default settings (e.g., casino vs. casino). In Experiment 1, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word-frequency, whereas in Experiment 2, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word length. Results showed that responses to words using a thin increase in interletter spacing were faster than the responses to words using the default settings-regardless of word-frequency and word length. Thus, interletter spacing plays an important role at modulating the identification of visually presented words.
authors.affiliation: Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain. mperea@valencia.edu
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Moret-Tatay
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gómez
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D014825:Vocabulary