ERIC Number: EJ689070
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Oct
Pages: 19
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0096-1523
EISSN: N/A
What Do Letter Migration Errors Reveal About Letter Position Coding in Visual Word Recognition?
Davis, Colin J.; Bowers, Jeffrey S.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, v30 n5 p923-941 Oct 2004
Dividing attention across multiple words occasionally results in misidentifications whereby letters apparently migrate between words. Previous studies have found that letter migrations preserve within-word letter position, which has been interpreted as support for position-specific letter coding. To investigate this issue, the authors used word pairs like STEP and SOAP, in which a letter in 1 word could migrate to an adjacent letter in another word to form an illusory word (STOP). Three experiments show that both same-position and adjacent-position letter migrations can occur, as well as migrations that cross 2 letter positions. These results argue against position-specific letter coding schemes used in many computational models of reading, and they provide support for coding schemes based on relative rather than absolute letter position.
Descriptors: Word Recognition, Visual Perception, Error Patterns, Coding, Computational Linguistics, Reading Processes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A