Showing papers by "Arthur M. Jacobs published in 1992"

Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory.

Abstract: Through the use of high- and low-frequency words of lengths 4, 5, 7, 9, and 11 letters, it is shown that the time it takes to name a word or to decide if a stimulus is a word or a nonword depends strongly on the position in the word where the eye is fixating at the moment the word appears. There is an optimal viewing position near the middle or slightly left of middle, where the time taken is shortest. For each letter of deviation from this optimal position, about 20 ms is added to lexcial decision time or naming latency. The effect is present even in short 4- and 5-letter words

Testing a semistochastic variant of the interactive activation model in different word recognition experiments.

Abstract: A semistochastic variant of the interactive activation (IA) model of context effects in letter perception (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) was used to simulate response time distributions and means in different experiments investigating the effects of word frequency, neighborhood size and frequency, and orthographic priming in visual word recognition. The results provide evidence in favor of the connectivity assumption underlying the model but question the necessity of the interactivity assumption for simulating latencies in word recognition tasks. Together with those of a recent study by McClelland (1991), the present results suggest that 10 years after its appearance, the IA model's potential for testing hypotheses about the structure and dynamics of basic phenomena of human information processing in a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks is not yet fully exploited.

Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition

Abstract: Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g.,astre-autre) or the fourth letter (chope-chose). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only tochope-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letterp inchope). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual word recognition.