Letter Position Coding Across Modalities: The Case of Braille
Readers |
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Authors: | Manuel Perea Cristina García-Chamorro Miguel Martín-Suesta Pablo Gómez |
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Institution: | 1. ERI-Lectura and Departamento de
Metodología, Universitat de València, Valencia,
Spain.; 2. Organización Nacional de Ciegos (ONCE),
Valencia, Spain.; 3. DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, United
States of America.; University of Leicester, United Kingdom, |
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Abstract: | BackgroundThe question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has
attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have
recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter
stimuli like jugde or caniso
are perceptually very close to their base words.MethodologyHere we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile
modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may
provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may
produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters
in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment
with adult Braille readers in which the pseudowords were created by
transposing/replacing two letters.Principal FindingsWe found a word-frequency effect for words. In addition, unlike parallel
experiments in the visual modality, we failed to find any clear signs of
transposed-letter confusability effects. This dissociation highlights the
differences between modalities.ConclusionsThe present data argue against models of letter position coding that assume
that transposed-letter effects (in the visual modality) occur at a
relatively late, abstract locus. |
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