Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Abstract

Learning to read puts evolutionary established speech and visual object recognition functions to novel use. As we previously showed, this leads to particular rearrangements and differentiations in these functions, for instance the habitual preference for holistic perceptual organization in visual object recognition and its suppression in perceiving letters. We performed the experiment in which the differentiation between holistic non-letter processing and analytic letter processing in literates was originally shown (van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004) with illiterate adults. The original differentiation is absent in illiterates; they uniformly showed analytic perception for both letters and non-letters. The result implies that analytic visual perception is not a secondary development resulting from learning to read but, rather, a primary mode of perceptual organization on a par with holistic perception.

Keywords: dyslexia; flanker; grapheme-phoneme conversion; illiterate participants; letter recognition; literacy; object recognition; reading acquisition.

Figure 1

Example for a letter target (left column) and a similar shape target (right column) as presented isolated (first line), surrounded by a form-congruent (second line) or a form-incongruent non-target in van Leeuwen and Lachmann (2004).

Figure 2

The fourth out of six rows used in the paper and pencil letter identification test.

Figure 3

Six selections of stimuli used in the experiment for individual participants. Further explanations in the text.

Figure 4

Average reaction times (RTs) with error bars (5% confidence interval) for the experimental conditions for illiterate participants (left) and for literate control participants (^* = significance at 5% level; ^** = significance at 1% level; ns = no significant difference).