Connecting the dots: Similar visual orthographic acquisition for Braille or line junctions

Most written systems share basic shape features with natural objects such as line junctions, a commonality thought to be at the basis of fluent reading. Studies that compared reading acquisition for different scripts used line-based scripts and investigated them in terms of complexity, novelty, or associations of stimuli from different categories. Here, we directly compared visual Braille, a script that only includes patterns of dots and no line junctions, to Line Braille, a novel, custom-made script based on line junctions drawn between Braille dots. For four consecutive days, two groups of participants (each N = 40) underwent online training of either one of the scripts, during which they first mapped new letters onto the Latin alphabet and then trained on full words. Each day, participants were tested by asking them to transcribe a set of stimuli (words and pseudowords) from the novel to the Latin script. Across sessions, we found no significant differences between scripts in the overall transcription accuracy nor in the time required to transcribe words. We only found a small delay in the learning trajectory of the Braille group represented through an interaction between group and session in overall accuracy, and slightly higher sensitivity for stimulus length in the Braille group. Overall, these results show that line junctions only provide a small and temporary benefit when learning a new script, contrasting with the idea that line junctions is a core visual features for learning orthography.