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Letter identity and visual similarity in the processing of diacritic letters
- Source :
- Memory & Cognition, Mem Cognit
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., a) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., (sic), /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., (sic), /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., (sic) = (sic)), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., (sic) < (sic)). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517-545, 2012a).
- Subjects :
- Consonant
Japanese kana
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Article
050105 experimental psychology
03 medical and health sciences
Prime (symbol)
0302 clinical medicine
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Reaction Time
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Diacritics
05 social sciences
Recognition, Psychology
Kana
Linguistics
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Reading
Diacritic
Word recognition
Noisy channel model
Visual Perception
Voice
Latin alphabet
Masked priming
Psychology
Priming (psychology)
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Memory & Cognition, Mem Cognit
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....1941842c0e3f87800c6bc7d3d4e19bb4