Assessing the influence of letter position in reading normal and transposed texts using a letter detection task.
During word recognition, some letters appear to play a more important role than others. Although some studies have suggested that the first and last letters of a word have a privileged status, there is no consensus with regards to the importance of the different letter positions when reading connected text. In the current experiments, we used a simple letter search task to examine the impact of letter position on word identification in connected text using a classic paper and pencil procedure (Experiment 1) and an eye movement monitoring procedure (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, a condition with transposed letters was included. Our results show that the first letter of a word is detected more easily than the other letters, and transposing letters in a word revealed the importance of the final letter. It is concluded that both the initial and final letters play a special role in word identification during reading but that the underlying processes might differ.
École de psychologie, Université de Moncton, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. katherine.guerard@umoncton.ca
Katherine
K
Guérard
Jean
J
Saint-Aubin
Marie
M
Poirier
Constantina
C
Demetriou
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities; D014825:Vocabulary