The role of configuration in the identification of visually degraded words

Abstract

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.

Role of contrast, lettercase, and viewing conditions in a lateralized word-naming task

“…In fact, there is evidence that the LH is equipped to process visual stimuli such as faces in terms of their configural properties, and that it may even prove better than the RH when highly contrasted information is presented (Sergent, in press b). In this respect, it is noteworthy that the advantage conferred to the RH by the configural properties of lowercase words was not significant in the no-mask condition, confirming Garner's (1981) suggestion that it requires sufficient degradation for these properties to be of benefit in a word-identification task for which individual letters are more informative and constitute the primary basis.…”

“…This relative advantage of LVF over RVF presentations with lowercase words may be attributed to the configural properties of the word which are more salientwith lower-thanwith uppercase letters (Garner, 1981), and which the RH may use more efficiently than the LH. This interaction may then indicate that some "cognitive" processing of the visual word was performed within the RH before information was transferred to the LH, since using the configuration of the word as an aid for identification must call for some knowledge about the visual structure of the word, beyond the sensory level.…”

“…As a result, the effects of degradation were relatively weak, but they were found to be sufficiently pronounced in pilot work to produce significant variations in performance. In addition, although Garner (1981) noted that the advantage resulting from the greater configural salience of lower-as opposed to uppercase letters was stronger with words spanning less than 1 deg of visual angle, it was necessary to use larger words because they were presented in the retinal periphery.…”

“…Garner (1978) has for a long time now argued and demonstrated that visual stimuli, such as printed words, have component (individual letters) and configural (whole-word shape) properties that coexist, the latter resulting from interrelationships among the former. Garner (1981) recently showed that there was greater configural differentiation when words were in lowercase, with ascending and descending letters (e.g., pat vs. tap) than when they were in uppercase letters of equal height (e.g., PAT -vs. TAP).…”

The effects of perceptual condition on proofreading for misspellings

“…Furthermore, the asymmetrical decision rule was not found for ElF or P/R substitutions, and the letters in these pairs have the same shape in terms of ascending and descending strokes but have different envelopes. The simple three-category shape classification overlooks the configural properties of words printed in uppercase characters (see Garner, 1981), whereas the notion of envelope seems to capture the relevant variables. A critical question left unanswered by previous work is the extent to which the information processing rules adopted by proofreaders are determined by the format and quality of the printed text that they are given to read.…”