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Target letter inclusion in single and multiple word substrings and identification accuracy
1Department of Psychology, Boise State University, ID 83725.
The Journal of General Psychology
|April 1, 1988
Summary
Target letter discrimination was similar in multi-word and unrelated letter strings. However, it was poorer when the target was adjacent to a trigram, suggesting context effects in letter perception.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Experimental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Contextual information influences letter perception.
- Previous research explored word superiority effects.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how subword units affect target letter discrimination.
- To test the interactive activation model's predictions regarding context effects.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Compared target letter discrimination in three conditions: multi-word quadrigrams, unrelated letter strings, and quadrigrams with a trigram context.
- Experiment 2: Manipulated stimulus presentation to rule out capacity limitations as an explanation for observed effects.
Main Results:
- Target letter discrimination was equivalent in multi-word and unrelated letter strings.
- Discrimination was significantly impaired when the target was adjacent to a trigram context.
- Capacity limitations did not explain the impaired discrimination in the trigram context condition.
Conclusions:
- The findings support the interactive activation model of letter perception.
- A modification involving inhibitory connections between word nodes is proposed to account for context effects.