María Jiménez

Do young readers have fast access to abstract lexical representations? Evidence from masked priming.

Although there is consensus that adult readers have fast access to abstract letter/word representations, the developmental trajectory of such access has not been mapped out yet. To examine whether developmental readers have rapid access to abstract representations during the early stages of word processing, we conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with two groups of young readers (third and fifth graders) and a group of young adults. We selected two types of words: (a) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually dissimilar (DIS words; e.g., arte/ARTE [Spanish for art]) and (b) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually similar (SIM words; e.g., vivo/VIVO [Spanish for alive]). For young adults and fifth graders, response times for DIS and SIM words were very similar in the matched- and mismatched-case identity priming conditions, which in turn produced shorter responses than the unrelated condition (i.e., ARTE-ARTE=arte-ARTE<edad-ARTE). This is consistent with the idea that there is fast access to abstract representations. In contrast, this process does not seem to be fully operative in third graders, as revealed by the pattern of data with DIS words (ARTE-ARTE<arte-ARTE=edad-ARTE). These findings have relevant implications for developmental models of visual word recognition and for the use of masked priming experiments with developmental readers.

A challenging dissociation in masked identity priming with the lexical decision task.

The masked priming technique has been used extensively to explore the early stages of visual-word recognition. One key phenomenon in masked priming lexical decision is that identity priming is robust for words, whereas it is small/unreliable for nonwords. This dissociation has usually been explained on the basis that masked priming effects are lexical in nature, and hence there should not be an identity prime facilitation for nonwords. We present two experiments whose results are at odds with the assumption made by models that postulate that identity priming is purely lexical, and also challenge the assumption that word and nonword responses are based on the same information. Our experiments revealed that for nonwords, but not for words, matched-case identity PRIME-TARGET pairs were responded to faster than mismatched-case identity prime-TARGET pairs, and this phenomenon was not modulated by the lowercase/uppercase feature similarity of the stimuli.

Letter position coding across modalities: Braille and sighted reading of sentences with jumbled words

This article explores how letter position coding is attained during braille reading and its implications for models of word recognition. When text is presented visually, the reading process easily adjusts to the jumbling of some letters (jugde–judge), with a small cost in reading speed. Two explanations have been proposed: One relies on a general mechanism of perceptual uncertainty at the visual level, and the other focuses on the activation of an abstract level of representation (i.e., bigrams) that is shared by all orthographic codes. Thus, these explanations make differential predictions about reading in a tactile modality. In the present study, congenitally blind readers read sentences presented on a braille display that tracked the finger position. The sentences either were intact or involved letter transpositions. A parallel experiment was conducted in the visual modality. Results revealed a substantially greater reading cost for the sentences with transposed-letter words in braille readers. In contrast with the findings with sighted readers, in which there is a cost of transpositions in the external (initial and final) letters, the reading cost in braille readers occurs serially, with a large cost for initial letter transpositions. Thus, these data suggest that the letter-position-related effects in visual word recognition are due to the characteristics of the visual stream.

Why braille reading is important and how to study it / Por qué es importante la lectura en braille y cómo estudiarla

Abstract Despite its relevance in theoretical and practical terms, braille reading has received little attention from researchers. Awareness of the pros and cons of the different procedures used to examine braille reading is needed to facilitate the realization of systematic studies and to improve teaching methods in braille reading. This study provides a critical examination of braille reading methods and highlights key points for future studies on tactile reading.

Is There a Genuine Advantage to the Upper Part of Words during Lexical Access? Evidence from the Stroop Task

A number of recent visual-word recognition and reading experiments have concluded that the upper part of words is more important for lexical access than is the lower part, which conforms with Huey’s (1908) observation. Here, we examined whether this phenomenon may simply be due to the fact that words in Indo-European languages tend to have a higher number of confusable letters in the lower than in the upper part. We manipulated the letter ambiguity of the upper and lower parts of words in two experiments in which we asked participants to report the presentation color of the upper and lower parts of color words and noncolor words, and in a baseline condition, of strings of &s (Stroop task). In Experiment 1, the lower part of noncolor words was more ambiguous than the upper part (upward-unbalanced words), whereas in Experiment 2, the ambiguities of the two parts of the noncolor words were similar (balanced words). For the upward-unbalanced noncolor words, the magnitude of lexical interference (relative to the baseline condition) was greater for the upper than for the lower part. Critically, the differences vanished when this factor was controlled (i.e., balanced words; Exp. 2). Thus, the apparent bias in favor of the upper part of words can be parsimoniously described as an idiosyncratic feature of the words’ component letters.