Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain.
Behav Res Methods. 2013 Jun;45(2):431-9. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0271-4.
Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.
字母视觉相似性指标已被用于控制经验和神经心理学研究的设计，并严格确定了阅读能力和读写能力习得的基础因素。此外，这些字母相似性/混淆矩阵对于研究人类认知的更一般方面也很有用，例如感知。尽管有许多字母视觉相似性矩阵可用，但如果它们要被阅读领域的研究人员使用，它们都有两个严重的局限性：（1）它们是使用来自快速阅读 aloud 任务和/或在降级呈现条件下获得的非典型阅读数据构建的；（2）它们仅包括来自英语字母表的字母。尽管有些字母视觉相似性矩阵是使用从正常阅读条件下收集的数据构建的，但这些矩阵要么基于旧字体，这些字体可能与现代印刷品中的字母不相似，要么从未发表过。本文首次提出了一个全面的字母视觉相似性/混淆矩阵，该矩阵是基于对清晰呈现的大小写字母的非定时反应构建的，这些字母存在于许多使用拉丁字母表的语言中，包括加泰罗尼亚语、荷兰语、英语、法语、加利西亚语、德语、意大利语、葡萄牙语和西班牙语。这样的矩阵对于研究阅读和读写能力习得背后的过程的研究人员将非常有用。
