Contrasting five different theories of letter position coding: evidence from orthographic similarity effects

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

111 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors, neighbors-once-removed, and double-substitution neighbors. In Experiment 1, we used an illusory word paradigm and found that neighbor-once-removed similarity contexts resulted in fewer illusory word reports than substitution neighbors but more illusory words than double-substitution neighbors. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a masked form priming technique with a lexical-decision task. The pattern of facilitation was as predicted by spatial coding but was incompatible with slot-coding, Wickelcoding, and both versions of open-bigram coding. These results provide further support for the SOLAR (self-organizing lexical aquisition and recognition) model of visual word identification.
Translated title of the contributionContrasting five different theories of letter position coding: evidence from orthographic similarity effects
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)535 - 557
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Volume32 (3)
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2006

Bibliographical note

Publisher: American Psychological Association

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Contrasting five different theories of letter position coding: evidence from orthographic similarity effects'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this