EXPRESS: The letter position coding mechanism of second language words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements

We conducted three eye movement experiments to investigate the mechanism for coding letter positions in a person’s second language during sentence reading; we also examined the role of morphology in this process with more rigorous manipulation. Given that readers not only obtain information from currently fixated words (i.e., the foveal area) but also from upcoming words (i.e., the parafoveal area) to guide their reading, we examined both when the targets were fixated (Exp. 1) and when the targets were seen parafoveally (Exp. 2 and Exp. 3). First, we found the classic transposed letter (TL) effect in Exp. 1, but not in Exp. 2 or Exp. 3. This implies that flexible letter position coding exists during sentence reading. However, this was limited to words located in the foveal area, suggesting that L2 readers whose L2 proficiency is not as high as skilled native readers are not able to extract and utilize the parafoveal letter identity and position information of a word, whether the word length is long (Exp. 2) or short (Exp. 3). Second, we found morphological information to influence the magnitude of the TL effect in Exp. 1. These results provide new eye movement evidence for the flexibility of L2 letter position coding during sentence reading, as well as the interactions between the different internal representations of words in this process. Altogether, this is helpful for understanding L2 sentence reading and visual word recognition. Thus, future L2 reading frameworks should integrate word recognition and eye movement control models.

Which Factors Modulate Letter Position Coding in Pre-literate Children?

One of the central landmarks of learning to read is the emergence of orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of letter identity and letter order): it constitutes the necessary link between the low-level stages of visual processing and the higher-level processing of words. Regarding the processing of letter position, many experiments have shown worse performance in various tasks for the transposed-letter pair judge-JUDGE than for the orthographic control jupte-JUDGE. Importantly, 4-y.o. pre-literate children also show letter transposition effects in a same-different task: TZ-ZT is more error-prone than TZ-PH. Here, we examined whether this effect with pre-literate children is related to the cognitive and linguistic skills required to learn to read. Specifically, we examined the relation of the transposed-letter in a same-different task with the scores of these children in phonological, alphabetic and metalinguistic awareness, linguistic skills, and basic cognitive processes. To that end, we used a standardized battery to assess the abilities related with early reading acquisition. Results showed that the size of the transposed-letter effect in pre-literate children was strongly associated with the sub-test on basic cognitive processes (i.e., memory and perception) but not with the other sub-tests. Importantly, identifying children who may need a pre-literacy intervention is crucial to minimize eventual reading difficulties. We discuss how this marker can be used as a tool to anticipate reading difficulties in beginning readers.

Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?

Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gray intensity, which indicated an unambiguous letter order. The pseudowords were either transposed-letter pseudowords or replaced-letter pseudowords (e.g., jugde vs. jupte). The results showed much longer response times and substantially more errors in the transposed-letter pseudowords than in the replacement-letter pseudowords, regardless of visual format. These findings favor the idea that language-specific orthographic element factors play an essential role when encoding letter position during word recognition.

What, Where, When and How of Visual Word Recognition: A Bibliometrics Review

The neural/mental operations involved in the process of visual word recognition (VWR) are fundamental for the efficient comprehension of written/printed words during reading. The present study used CiteSpace, a visual analysis software, to identify the intellectual landscape where VWR has been reviewed in the past decade. Thus, synthesized co-citation networks were analyzed to explore and discuss the main questions raised in the VWR literature: the research fronts and the emerging trends of research on this topic. Our results showed that the main questions addressed in VWR studies during the last decade have been focused on four main aspects related to “what,” “where,” “when,” and “how” of VWR; to be specific, the different types of representations assessed during VWR (“what”), the locations and the timing of the brain activity involved in VWR (“where” and “when”), and the interactivity among different representations during processing (“how”). Among the revised studies, letter position coding was found to be the main topic of interest, possibly reflecting the critical role of this process. Furthermore, the evidence found in these studies consistently supported that VWR implies access to phonological, semantic, and morphological representations, which interact and modulate the processing of written words, particularly during early stages. Altogether, our findings showed the evolution in VWR literature regarding the different cognitive and neural operations involved in this process, highlighting the growing interest over the last decade toward the top-down way that mental representations interact.

Can letter position encoding be modified by visual perceptual elements?

A plethora of studies has revealed that letter position coding is relatively flexible during word recognition (e.g., the transposed-letter [TL] pseudoword CHOLOCATE is frequently misread as CHOCOLATE). A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that letter identity and location are not perfectly bound as a consequence of the limitations of the visual system. Thus, a complete characterization of letter position coding requires an examination of how letter position coding can be modulated by visual perceptual elements. Here we conducted three lexical decision experiments with TL and replacement-letter pseudowords that manipulated the visual characteristics of the stimuli. In Experiment 1, each syllable was presented either in a different colour or monochromatically (e.g., [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]) with the transposition occurring across syllables. In Experiment 2, the critical letters had a consistent contrast or not (e.g., [Formula: see text] vs. [Formula: see text]). In Experiment 3, the stimuli were presented either simultaneously or serially, letter by letter (i.e., as occurs in braille reading). Results showed that whereas colouring differently each syllable only produced a small nonsignificant reduction of the TL effect, the other two manipulations—presenting the two critical letters with an altered contrast and presenting the letters one at a time—reduced, but did not eliminate, the magnitude of the TL effect relative to the regular format. Although these findings are consistent with models that postulate an early perceptual locus of the TL effect, the robustness of the TL effect suggests that letter position coding also has an orthographic abstract component.