Snell Joshua, Bertrand Daisy, Grainger Jonathan
Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France.
Brain & Language Research Institute, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Mem Cognit. 2018 May;46(4):589-599. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0786-0.
The masked-priming lexical decision task has been the paradigm of choice for investigating how readers code for letter identity and position. Insight into the temporal integration of information between prime and target words has pointed out, among other things, that readers do not code for the absolute position of letters. This conception has spurred various accounts of the word recognition process, but the results at present do not favor one account in particular. Thus, employing a new strategy, the present study moves out of the arena of temporal- and into the arena of spatial information integration. We present two lexical decision experiments that tested how the processing of six-letter target words is influenced by simultaneously presented flanking stimuli (each stimulus was presented for 150 ms). We manipulated the orthographic relatedness between the targets and flankers, in terms of both letter identity (same/different letters based on the target's outer/inner letters) and letter position (intact/reversed order of letters and of flankers, contiguous/noncontiguous flankers). Target processing was strongly facilitated by same-letter flankers, and this facilitatory effect was modulated by both letter/flanker order and contiguity. However, when the flankers consisted of the target's inner-positioned letters alone, letter order no longer mattered. These findings suggest that readers may code for the relative position of letters using words' edges as spatial points of reference. We conclude that the flanker paradigm provides a fruitful means to investigate letter-position coding in the fovea and parafovea.
掩蔽启动词汇判断任务一直是研究读者如何对字母的身份和位置进行编码的首选范式。对启动词和目标词之间信息的时间整合的洞察表明，除其他外，读者不会对字母的绝对位置进行编码。这一概念激发了对单词识别过程的各种解释，但目前的结果并不特别支持某一种解释。因此，本研究采用一种新策略，从时间信息整合领域转向空间信息整合领域。我们进行了两项词汇判断实验，测试了同时呈现的侧翼刺激（每个刺激呈现150毫秒）如何影响六字母目标词的加工。我们从字母身份（基于目标词的外部/内部字母的相同/不同字母）和字母位置（字母和侧翼的顺序完整/颠倒，侧翼相邻/不相邻）两方面操纵了目标词和侧翼词之间的正字法相关性。相同字母的侧翼词对目标词加工有强烈促进作用，这种促进作用受字母/侧翼词顺序和相邻性的调节。然而，当侧翼词仅由目标词内部位置的字母组成时，字母顺序就不再重要了。这些发现表明，读者可能以单词边缘作为空间参考点来对字母的相对位置进行编码。我们得出结论，侧翼范式为研究中央凹和中央凹旁的字母位置编码提供了一种富有成效的方法。
