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. 2022 Dec;29(6):2275-2283.
doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02078-0. Epub 2022 Jun 1.

Raeding with the fingres: Towards a universal model of letter position coding

Ana Baciero  1 , Pablo Gomez  2 , Jon Andoni Duñabeitia  3   4 , Manuel Perea  3   5
Affiliations

Raeding with the fingres: Towards a universal model of letter position coding

Ana Baciero et al. Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

Letter position coding in word recognition has been widely investigated in the visual modality (e.g., labotarory is confusable with laboratory), but not as much in the tactile modality using braille, leading to an incomplete understanding of whether this process is modality-dependent. Unlike sighted readers, braille readers do not show a transposed-letter similarity effect with nonadjacent transpositions (e.g., labotarory = labodanory; Perea et al., 2012). While this latter finding was taken to suggest that the flexibility in letter position coding was due to visual factors (e.g., perceptual uncertainty in the location of visual objects (letters)), it is necessary to test whether transposed-letter effects occur with adjacent letters to reach firm conclusions. Indeed, in the auditory modality (i.e., another serial modality), a transposed-phoneme effect occurs for adjacent but not for nonadjacent transpositions. In a lexical decision task, we examined whether pseudowords created by transposing two adjacent letters of a word (e.g., laboartory) are more confusable with their base word (laboratory) than pseudowords created by replacing those letters (laboestory) in braille. Results showed that transposed-letter pseudowords produced more errors and slower responses than the orthographic controls. Thus, these findings suggest that the mechanism of serial order, while universal, can be shaped by the sensory modality at play.

Keywords: Braille; Lexical decision; Transposed-letter effect; Word recognition.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Mean response time (RT) and accuracy overall (in green) and by participant (in grey) for replacement-letter (RL) and transposed-letter (TL) pseudowords. The top two plots correspond to data from Perea et al. (2012). The bottom two plots correspond to the present experiment
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Mean response time and accuracy overall (in orange) and by participant (in grey) for high-frequency (HF) and Low-frequency (LF) words. The top two plots correspond to data from Perea et al. (2012). The bottom two plots correspond to the present experiment
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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