Université Lumière Lyon 2, Laboratoire d'Étude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, 69007, Lyon, France.
Departamento de Procesos Psicológicos Básicos y su Desarrollo, Universidad del País Vasco, 20018 Donostia, Spain.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2025 Jan;249:106081. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.106081. Epub 2024 Sep 28.
Efficient reading requires the association of different letter identities with their positions in the written word. This leads to the development of a specialized mechanism for encoding flexible location-invariant letter positions through learning to read. In this study, we investigated not only the emergence and development of this position coding mechanism but also whether this mechanism is a consequence of the orthographic code (i.e., letter specific) or inherent to generic visual object recognition. To do so, the same-different matching task was used with children from Grade 1 to Grade 5 (Experiment 1) and with adults (Experiment 2). In both experiments, reference and target stimuli were composed of four-character strings (consonants, digits, and geometrical forms) and could be identical or different by transposing or substituting two internal characters. Analyses of response times, error rates, and discriminability indices revealed a transposed-character effect regardless of the type of characters in Grades 1 and 2, whereas transposed-character effects were greater for letter strings than for familiar non-letter strings in Grade 3, lasting up to Grade 5 as well as in adults. These results provided evidence in favor of a flexible position coding mechanism that is specific to letter strings, which emerges with reading experience as a consequence of parallel processing of letters within words.
高效阅读需要将不同的字母与它们在单词中的位置联系起来。这导致了一种专门的机制的发展，通过学习阅读来对灵活的位置不变的字母位置进行编码。在这项研究中，我们不仅研究了这种位置编码机制的出现和发展，还研究了这种机制是否是正字法（即字母特定）的结果，还是固有于通用视觉对象识别。为此，我们使用了相同-不同匹配任务，参与者包括 1 年级到 5 年级的儿童（实验 1）和成年人（实验 2）。在这两个实验中，参考和目标刺激都是由四个字符组成的字符串（辅音、数字和几何形状），可以通过交换或替换两个内部字符来保持一致或不同。对反应时间、错误率和辨别指数的分析表明，1 年级和 2 年级的参与者无论字符类型如何都表现出了字符交换效应，而在 3 年级，字母字符串的字符交换效应大于熟悉的非字母字符串，这种效应一直持续到 5 年级以及成年人。这些结果为灵活的位置编码机制提供了证据，该机制是特定于字母字符串的，它是随着阅读经验的积累而作为单词中字母的并行处理的结果而出现的。
