Perea Manuel, Romero-Ortells Inka, Labusch Melanie, Fernández-López María, Marcet Ana
Department of Methodology and ERI-Lectura, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
Centro de Investigación Nebrija en Cognición (CINC), Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain.
J Cogn. 2023 Sep 27;6(1):56. doi: 10.5334/joc.322. eCollection 2023.
Neurobiological models of reading assume that the specialized detectors at the letter level (e.g., the arrays of detectors for the letter 'n') possess a certain degree of tolerance (e.g., Local Combination Detectors model, Dehaene et al. 2005). In this study, we designed two lexical decision experiments that examined the limits of tolerance of letter detectors by introducing a novel manipulation involving shifting letter halves (e.g., in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2) relative to intact items. This manipulation alters the transition between upper and lower parts of the letters, adding junctions that do not exist in the intact letter forms. We included high- and low-frequency words in the stimulus list to investigate whether letter distortion affects processing beyond the letter level, reasoning that interactive effects would signal top-down lexical feedback. In Experiment 1, which employed a subtle letter shift, we observed a minimal cost of letter distortion that did not interact with word frequency. Experiment 2, employing a larger letter shift, revealed an overall greater reading cost that affected differentially high- and low-frequency words. Overall, these findings offer insights into the limits of resilience in letter detectors to distortion during word recognition and introduce a novel manipulation of letter distortion.
阅读的神经生物学模型假定，字母层面的专门探测器（例如，字母“n”的探测器阵列）具有一定程度的容错能力（例如，局部组合探测器模型，德阿纳等人，2005年）。在本研究中，我们设计了两个词汇判断实验，通过引入一种涉及将字母的两半相对完整项目进行移动的新颖操作（例如，在实验1中；在实验2中），来检验字母探测器的容错极限。这种操作改变了字母上下部分之间的过渡，增加了完整字母形式中不存在的连接点。我们在刺激列表中纳入了高频和低频单词，以研究字母变形是否会影响字母层面以上的加工过程，推断交互效应将表明自上而下的词汇反馈。在实验1中，我们采用了细微的字母移动，观察到字母变形的代价极小，且与单词频率没有交互作用。实验2采用了更大的字母移动，结果显示总体阅读代价更大，且对高频和低频单词的影响存在差异。总体而言，这些发现为单词识别过程中字母探测器对变形的耐受极限提供了见解，并引入了一种新颖的字母变形操作。
