The time course of Braille word recognition

Skilled blind readers read French nouns with the uniqueness point in different locations, presented in unabbreviated braille, and either pronounced each item (Experiment 1) or classified it as to gender (Experiments 1-3). As in previous studies with spoken words, effects of uniqueness point location on recognition reaction time were taken as demonstrating on-line lexical access. For braille words, significant effects were obtained in Experiment 1 in the two tasks. In Experiment 2, blind Ss demonstrated comparable relative uniqueness point effects for gender classification of braille and of spoken words, showing that on-line lexical access is not specific to speech. Experiment 3 showed that the effect of uniqueness point location is limited to the higher frequency words. Finally, mean finger scanning speed did not differ between the pre- and post-uniqueness point regions of the words.