Word knowledge influences character perception

• Published in: Psychonomic bulletin & review Vol. 18; no. 5; pp. 833 - 839
• Main Authors: Li, Xingshan, Pollatsek, Alexander
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer-Verlag 01-10-2011; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Biological and medical sciences; China; Cognitive Psychology; Experiments; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Fuzzy logic; Humans; Language; Male; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Photic Stimulation; Production and perception of written language; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Reading; Recognition (Psychology); Studies; Vocabulary; Word processing; Young Adult; China; Reading; Word recognition; Human; Word; Language; Vision; Perception; Chinese; Cognition; Experimental study; Knowledge; Recognition
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/s13423-011-0115-8

In two experiments, we examined whether context information can affect the activity of the nodes at the character level. Chinese readers viewed two Chinese characters; one was intact, but the other (the target) was embedded in a rectangle of visual noise and increased in visibility over time. The two characters constituted a word in one condition but did not in the other condition. The task was to press a button to indicate whether the character in the noise was at the top or bottom of the rectangle. (They did not have to identify the character.) Response times were faster in the word condition than in the nonword condition. Because the “wordness” of the stimulus was logically irrelevant to judging the location of the target character, the data indicate that processing at the word level can feed back to fairly low-level judgments, such as where a character is.