Transposed-letter effects in reading: evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview.

Full Abstract

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2, previews fell into 1 of 5 conditions:
(a) identical to the target word, (b) a transposition of 2 internal letters, (c) a substitution of 2 internal letters, (d) a transposition of the 2 final letters, or (e) a substitution of the 2 final letters. In Experiment 3, the authors used a further set of conditions to explore the importance of external letter positions. The findings extend previous work and demonstrate that transposed-letter effects exist in silent reading. These experiments also indicate that letter identity information can be extracted from the parafovea outside of absolute letter position from the first 5 letters of the word to the right of fixation. Finally, the results support the notion that exterior letters play important roles in visual word recognition.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: Johnson, Rebecca L (RL); Perea, Manuel (M); Rayner, Keith (K);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. becca(-atsign-)psych.umass.edu

Grants: HD07327 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS) ; HD26765 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-Feb; vol 33 (issue 1) : pp 209-29

Dates: Created 2007/02/21; Completed 2007/03/30; Revised 2007/12/03;

PMID: 17311489, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

These are the highest related articles currently in the database:

See 100+ related articles.