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Published on: June 25, 2019
Language-universal and script-specific factors in the recognition of letters in visual crowding: The effects of
Adi Shechter1, Sivan Medina2, David L Share1
1The Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel; Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Abstract:
Peripheral letter recognition is fundamentally limited not by the visibility of letters but by the spacing between them, i.e., 'crowding'. Crowding imposes a significant constraint on reading, however, the interplay between crowding and reading is not fully understood. Using a letter recognition task in varying display conditions, we investigated the effects of lexicality (words versus pseudowords), visual hemifield, and transitional letter probability (bigram/trigram frequency) among skilled readers (N = 14. and N = 13) in Hebrew - a script read from right to left. We observed two language-universal effects: a lexicality effect and a right hemifield (left hemisphere) advantage, as well as a strong language-specific effect - a left bigram advantage stemming from the right-to-left reading direction of Hebrew. The latter finding suggests that transitional probabilities are essential for parafoveal letter recognition. The results reveal that script-specific contextual information such as letter combination probabilities is used to accurately identify crowded letters.
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