Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition
IntroductionCurrent neurobiological-inspired models of visual-word recognition propose that letter detectors in the word recognition system can tolerate some variations in the visual form of the letters. However, it is unclear whether this tolerance extends to novel ligatures, which combine two lett...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2023-06-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Psychology |
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| Online Access: | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1166192/full |
| _version_ | 1797805745661542400 |
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| author | María Fernández-López Manuel Perea Manuel Perea Ana Marcet |
| author_facet | María Fernández-López Manuel Perea Manuel Perea Ana Marcet |
| author_sort | María Fernández-López |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | IntroductionCurrent neurobiological-inspired models of visual-word recognition propose that letter detectors in the word recognition system can tolerate some variations in the visual form of the letters. However, it is unclear whether this tolerance extends to novel ligatures, which combine two letters into a single glyph.MethodsTo investigate this, the present study utilized a masked priming experiment with a lexical decision task to examine whether primes containing novel ligatures are effective in activating their corresponding base word, relative to omitted-letter primes, in the initial stages of word processing. For each target word (e.g., VIRTUAL), were created an identity prime (virtual), a prime containing a novel ligature of two of the letters (e.g., virtual; “ir” in a single glyph), and an omitted-letter prime where one letter was removed (e.g., vrtual [omitted-vowel] in Experiment 1; vitual [omitted-consonant] in Experiment 2).ResultsResults showed that the presence of a novel ligature in the prime resulted in faster lexical decision times compared to a prime with an omitted vowel (Experiment 1), but not with an omitted consonant (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the performance with the primes containing the novel ligature was not different from that of the identity primes.DiscussionThese results suggest that the word recognition system can quickly enable separate letter detectors for novel ligatures. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the front-end of visual-word recognition. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-13T05:56:42Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-354c027d8f1947caa2d5d754a79e2f46 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1664-1078 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-13T05:56:42Z |
| publishDate | 2023-06-01 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Frontiers in Psychology |
| spelling | doaj.art-354c027d8f1947caa2d5d754a79e2f462023-06-13T04:35:20ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Psychology1664-10782023-06-011410.3389/fpsyg.2023.11661921166192Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognitionMaría Fernández-López0Manuel Perea1Manuel Perea2Ana Marcet3Department of Methodology of Behavioral Sciences and ERI-Lectura, Universitat de València, Valencia, SpainDepartment of Methodology of Behavioral Sciences and ERI-Lectura, Universitat de València, Valencia, SpainCenter of Research in Cognition, Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid, SpainGrupo de Investigación en Enseñanza de Lenguas (GIEL), Department of Language and Literature Teaching, Universitat de València, Valencia, SpainIntroductionCurrent neurobiological-inspired models of visual-word recognition propose that letter detectors in the word recognition system can tolerate some variations in the visual form of the letters. However, it is unclear whether this tolerance extends to novel ligatures, which combine two letters into a single glyph.MethodsTo investigate this, the present study utilized a masked priming experiment with a lexical decision task to examine whether primes containing novel ligatures are effective in activating their corresponding base word, relative to omitted-letter primes, in the initial stages of word processing. For each target word (e.g., VIRTUAL), were created an identity prime (virtual), a prime containing a novel ligature of two of the letters (e.g., virtual; “ir” in a single glyph), and an omitted-letter prime where one letter was removed (e.g., vrtual [omitted-vowel] in Experiment 1; vitual [omitted-consonant] in Experiment 2).ResultsResults showed that the presence of a novel ligature in the prime resulted in faster lexical decision times compared to a prime with an omitted vowel (Experiment 1), but not with an omitted consonant (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the performance with the primes containing the novel ligature was not different from that of the identity primes.DiscussionThese results suggest that the word recognition system can quickly enable separate letter detectors for novel ligatures. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the front-end of visual-word recognition.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1166192/fullword recognitionlexical accessreadinglexical decisionvisual similarity |
| spellingShingle | María Fernández-López Manuel Perea Manuel Perea Ana Marcet Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition Frontiers in Psychology word recognition lexical access reading lexical decision visual similarity |
| title | Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition |
| title_full | Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition |
| title_fullStr | Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition |
| title_full_unstemmed | Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition |
| title_short | Breaking the boundaries: the power of ligatures in visual-word recognition |
| title_sort | breaking the boundaries the power of ligatures in visual word recognition |
| topic | word recognition lexical access reading lexical decision visual similarity |
| url | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1166192/full |
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