TY - JOUR
T1 - Both-edges representation of letter position in reading
AU - Fischer-Baum, Simon
AU - Charny, Jonathan
AU - McCloskey, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by fellowships from the William Orr Dingwall Foundation and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation granted to the first author. We thank Brenda Rapp and Carol Whitney for useful discussions concerning this work. Portions of this work were presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. may be downloaded along with this article from www.springerlink.com .
PY - 2011/12
Y1 - 2011/12
N2 - The representations that underlie our ability to read must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also their relative positions. In recent years, many new proposals have been advanced concerning the representation of letter position in reading, but the available data do not distinguish among the competing proposals; multiple theories, each positing a different letter position representation scheme, are compatible with the evidence. In this article, we report two experiments that used the illusory word paradigm (e. g., Davis & Bowers, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30: 923-941, 2004) to distinguish among alternative schemes for representing letter position in reading. The results support a scheme that uses both the beginning and the end of a word as anchoring points. This both-edges scheme has been implicated in letter position representation in spelling (Fischer-Baum, McCloskey, & Rapp, Cognition, 115: 466-490, 2010), as well as in position representation in verbal working memory (Henson, Memory & Cognition, 27: 915-927, 1999), suggesting that it may be a domain-general scheme for representing position in a sequence.
AB - The representations that underlie our ability to read must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also their relative positions. In recent years, many new proposals have been advanced concerning the representation of letter position in reading, but the available data do not distinguish among the competing proposals; multiple theories, each positing a different letter position representation scheme, are compatible with the evidence. In this article, we report two experiments that used the illusory word paradigm (e. g., Davis & Bowers, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30: 923-941, 2004) to distinguish among alternative schemes for representing letter position in reading. The results support a scheme that uses both the beginning and the end of a word as anchoring points. This both-edges scheme has been implicated in letter position representation in spelling (Fischer-Baum, McCloskey, & Rapp, Cognition, 115: 466-490, 2010), as well as in position representation in verbal working memory (Henson, Memory & Cognition, 27: 915-927, 1999), suggesting that it may be a domain-general scheme for representing position in a sequence.
KW - Letter migration errors
KW - Letter position representation
KW - Orthographic input coding
KW - Reading
KW - Visual word identification
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U2 - 10.3758/s13423-011-0160-3
DO - 10.3758/s13423-011-0160-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 21935735
AN - SCOPUS:81355135464
SN - 1069-9384
VL - 18
SP - 1083
EP - 1089
JO - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
JF - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
IS - 6
ER -