Ripamonti Enrico, Luzzatti Claudio, Zoccolotti Pierluigi, Traficante Daniela
1 Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico (IRCCS), Milan, Italy.
2 Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Sep;71(9):1911-1920. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1363791. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
The word superiority effect (WSE) denotes better recognition of a letter embedded in a word rather than in a pseudoword. Along with WSE, also a pseudoword superiority effect (PSE) has been described: It is easier to recognise a letter in a legal pseudoword than in an unpronounceable nonword. At the current state of the art, both WSE and PSE have been mainly tested with English speakers. This study uses the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm with native speakers of Italian (a shallow orthography language). Different from English and French, we found WSE for reaction times (RTs) only, whereas PSE was significant for both accuracy and RTs. This finding indicates that in the Reicher-Wheeler task, readers of a shallow orthography language can effectively rely on both the lexical and the sublexical routes. As to the effect of letter position, a clear advantage for the first-letter position emerged, a finding suggesting a fine-grained processing of the letter strings with coding of letter position and indicating the role of visual acuity and crowding factors.
单词优势效应（WSE）指嵌入单词中的字母比嵌入假词中的字母更容易被识别。与单词优势效应一样，也有假词优势效应（PSE）的描述：识别合法假词中的字母比识别不可发音的非词中的字母更容易。在当前的技术水平下，单词优势效应和假词优势效应主要都是以英语使用者为对象进行测试的。本研究对意大利语母语者（一种拼写较简单的语言）使用了赖克-惠勒范式。与英语和法语不同，我们发现仅反应时间（RT）存在单词优势效应，而假词优势效应在准确性和反应时间方面均显著。这一发现表明，在赖克-惠勒任务中，拼写较简单语言的读者可以有效地依赖词汇和次词汇两条路径。关于字母位置的影响，首字母位置呈现出明显优势，这一发现表明对字母串进行了精细加工，包括字母位置编码，并表明了视敏度和拥挤因素的作用。
