Exaggerated case effects when logographic readers process alphabetically written words

Research on visual word recognition has shown that letter and word processing is largely immune to variations in surface properties, such as lowercase/UPPERCASE or CaSe MiXinG presentation, which points to the existence of abstract letter representations. However, in languages with non-alphabetic scripts, a word is represented by a character of symbol, rather than a string of letters. How do biscriptal readers with a primary non-alphabetic orthography read alphabetic words? In the current study, fifty-four native readers of English and 48 logographic-script (Chinese and Japanese) readers performed a lexical decision task on English words and nonwords presented in upper- or lowercase. In line with previous research, case variation had only a very minor effect for the alphabetic readers, but it was much more pronounced for the logographic-script readers, and the case effect emerged both in words and nonwords. Findings are discussed in terms of abstractionist vs episodic accounts of letter processing.