EXPRESS: Efectos exagerados de las mayúsculas y minúsculas cuando los lectores logográficos procesan palabras...

Research on visual word recognition has shown that letter and word processing is largely immune to variations in surface properties, such as lowercase/UPPERCASE or CaSe MiXinG presentation, which points to the existence of abstract letter representations. However, in languages with non-alphabetic scripts, a word is represented by a character of symbol, rather than a string of letters. How do biscriptal readers with a primary non-alphabetic orthography read alphabetic words? In the current study, fifty-four native readers of English and 48 logographic-script (Chinese and Japanese) readers performed a lexical decision task on English words and nonwords presented in upper- or lowercase. In line with previous research, case variation had only a very minor effect for the alphabetic readers, but it was much more pronounced for the logographic-script readers, and the case effect emerged both in words and nonwords. Findings are discussed in terms of abstractionist vs episodic accounts of letter processing.