Solman R T
Perception. 1982;11(3):305-17. doi: 10.1068/p110305.
Two experiments are described in which subjects were required to report the name of a single position-cued 'critical' letter in a tachistoscopically displayed string of four letters. The stimulus characters were arranged to form three types of letter strings: (i) strings in which the letters did not form words; (ii) words in which contextual constraint of the critical letters was minimised; and (iii) words in which contextual constraint of the critical letters was maximised. The serial position of the letter to be identified in each string was cued at delays of -500, -100, and +500 ms, in experiment 1 and at delays of -510 and +510 ms in experiment 2, and in both experiments one group of subjects responded to letter strings which subtended a horizontal visual angle of 3.95 deg, while a second group responded to strings which subtended 1.02 deg. Correct identifications of critical letters showed that the presentation of words resulted in superior performance. This 'word superiority effect' is consistent with earlier findings implying that it has a perceptual locus. For the stimuli which subtended the large visual angle the word advantage was detrimentally affected only when the position of the critical letter to be identified was cued either 500 or 510 ms prior to the display of the letter string.
本文描述了两项实验，要求受试者报告在速示器上呈现的四个字母的字符串中，由位置提示的单个“关键”字母的名称。刺激字符被安排形成三种类型的字母串：（i）字母不构成单词的字符串；（ii）关键字母的上下文约束最小化的单词；（iii）关键字母的上下文约束最大化的单词。在实验1中，每个字符串中要识别的字母的序列位置在-500、-100和+500毫秒的延迟下被提示，在实验2中在-510和+510毫秒的延迟下被提示，并且在两个实验中，一组受试者对张角为3.95度的水平视角的字母串做出反应，而另一组受试者对张角为1.02度的字符串做出反应。对关键字母的正确识别表明，单词的呈现导致了更好的表现。这种“单词优势效应”与早期的研究结果一致，这意味着它具有感知位点。对于张角较大的刺激，只有当要识别的关键字母的位置在字母串显示前500或510毫秒被提示时，单词优势才会受到不利影响。
