Are visually presented one-syllable words integral stimuli?

Silverman, Wayne

doi:10.3758/bf03336942

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…In a task in which treating the letter string as a whole could improve performance (via redundancy gain), Silverman (1976) found that words were processed as integral stimuli, and nonwords or consonant strings, as separable stimuli. However, when the task required filtering out the other letters and attending only to the first letter, as in the present experiments, Silverman (1977) found performance to be no worse on words than on nonwords. "The total absence of interference in the word-filtering task suggests that visually presented one-syllable words are not integral stimuli" (p. 104).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…Words thus might be searched faster, not because the target letter is seen more clearly in them, but because its location is determined more accurately(e.g., Krueger& Shapiro, 1979). When the location of the target letter is precued, on the other hand, performance typically is no better for words than for nonwords (Johnston & McClelland, 1974;Silverman, 1976Silverman, , 1977Sloboda, 1976; see Krueger's, 1975, review). Words might even make their letters qua forms more difficult to see, either because the word as a unitary whole might tend to swallow up its letter components or because the recognition response to the word might tend to compete with the recognition responses to the letters.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Repeating the target neither speeds nor slows its detection: Evidence for independent channels in letter processing

Krueger

Shapiro

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeating the target neither speeds nor slows its detection: Evidence for independent channels in letter processing

Krueger

Shapiro

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Here, too, task demands and conditions favored not decoding the component letters of the word. Likewise, when treating the letter string as a whole could improve performance (via redundancy gain), Silverman (1976) found that words were processed as integral stimuli, and nonwords or consonant strings as separable stimuli; however, when the task required filtering out the other letters and attending only to the first letter, Silverman (1977) found performance to be no worse on words than on nonwords (see also Krueger & Shapiro, 1980), which "suggests that visually presented onesyllable words are not integral stimuli" (p. 104). Greenberg and Krueger (1983) presented several intact words at a time (upright, preview condition), but required an overt response to each individual word, which may explain why they found a word advantage on response time (RT) with a multiword display.…”

Section: Single-word and Multiword Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of intraword and interword letter repetition: A test of the word unitization hypothesis

Krueger

1989

Memory & Cognition

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Do words, as familiar units or gestalts, tend to swallow up and conceal their letter components (Pillsbury, 1897)? Letters typically are detected faster and more accurately in words than in nonwords (i.e., scrambled collections of letters), and in more frequent words than in less frequent words. However, a word advantage at encoding, where the representation of the string is formed, might compensate for, and thus mask, a word disadvantage at decoding and comparison, where the component letters of the representation are accessed and compared with the target letter. To better reveal any such word disadvantage, a task was used in this study that increased the amount of letter processing. Subjects judged whether a letter was repeated within a six-letter word or a nonword (Experiment 1; intraword letter repetition) or was repeated between two adjacent unrelated six-letter words or nonwords (Experiment 2; interword letter repetition). Contrary to Pillsbury's word unitization hypothesis, both types of letter repetition (intraword and interword) were detected faster and just as accurately with words as with nonwords. In Experiment 2, however, interword letter repetition was detected less accurately on common words (but not on rare words or third-order pseudowords) than on the corresponding nonwords. Thus, although the familiar word does not deny access to its own component letters, it does make their comparison with letters from other words more difficult. Do words reveal or conceal their component letters? Some authors have argued that the word, as a familiar unit or gestalt, ought to conceal its letters. According to Pillsbury (1897), in a brief presentation of a word, "the rush of recognition may beso violent that the letters themselves are entirely neglected-forgotten, or not seen at all" (p. 378). Thus, the word may tend to overshadow or swallow up its letter components.Letters need not be seen at all if words are recognized or encoded in a holistic manner, that is, "on the basis of supraletter features from units larger than the letter" (Proctor & Healy, 1985, p. 287). Besner, Davelaar, Alcott, andParry (1984) reviewed the evidence and concluded that the single word is not recognized on the basis of transletter features or the outline shape of the word: "letter recognition is ... a necessary preliminary to word recognition" (p. 132). But even if "with highly familiar words such as the or and, identification often can occur at the word level prior to complete letter identification" (Proctor & Healy, 1985, p. 287), that would not necessarily block or retard subsequent access to the letter contents, which is the key issue here. "The crucial assumption of the unitization hypotheses ... is that once a larger unit is identified, the processing of its component letter units stops, even if the letters have not yet been identiThe author is grateful to Philip A. Allen and Alice F. Healy for helpful comments on an earlier version of this report. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lester E. Krueger, Human PerformanceCent...

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“…(2) The task was one of word identification in which each word in the set was actually pronounced. In the previous work of both Garner (1981) and Silverman (1976Silverman ( , 1977, subjects were never required to use the actual word as a response, but they used either a manual response or a card classification. The use of word identification in the present experiments was intended to increase the likelihood that whole-word properties would be used by requiring a whole-word response.…”

Section: Purpose Of Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Analysis of errors showed no tendency for the words to be used holistically, since when errors were made, they tended to be made with responses differing only in a single letter position. Later, Silverman (1976Silverman ( , 1977 used such three-letter words and found some evidence for holistic perception with discrimination tasks of the sort used by Garner (1974Garner ( , 1978b to investigate integrality and separability of stimulus dimensions. Specifically, he found some increased speed of discrimination to pairs of words differing in both the first and third letter positions compared with pairs differing in only a single letter position; in condensation classification tasks requiring two words to be put into each class, but with neither the first nor the third letter being the same for a given class, words were classified faster than nonwords.…”

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confidence: 99%

The role of configuration in the identification of visually degraded words

Garner

1981

Mem Cogn

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Two experiments were carried out in which reaction time for identification of words in sets of four was measured. The words were of three letters, with dichotomous variation of the first and third letters, in either upper-or lowercase, with letters chosen to give maximum variation in word configuration in lowercase. Four types of display were used, differing in size and masking. In Experiment 1, the words were easy to identify in uppercase as well as in lowercase, because the letters were easily discriminable in either case, and the results showed no advantage to lowercase words at any level of degradation. In Experiment 2, the letters were more difficult to discriminate in uppercase, and with the most severe degradation, the words in lowercase were identified more rapidly than those in uppercase. Thus the reaction time results showed an advantage of the configural properties available in lowercase only with words difficult to identify in uppercase and with extreme amounts of degradation. Error analyses of both experiments showed that errors were made to individual letters, not on the basis of the configuration, for words in both cases. It is concluded that letter processing occurs even when there is evidence for the use of configural information, thus implying a predominant role of letter perception in word identification. Some reservation is expressed whether whole-word configuration is the only pertinent configural property and whether the results from such simple identification tasks are appropriate to an understanding of natural reading.

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Are visually presented one-syllable words integral stimuli?

Cited by 4 publications

References 10 publications

Repeating the target neither speeds nor slows its detection: Evidence for independent channels in letter processing

Repeating the target neither speeds nor slows its detection: Evidence for independent channels in letter processing

Detection of intraword and interword letter repetition: A test of the word unitization hypothesis

The role of configuration in the identification of visually degraded words

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