ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 3 / 40What exactly is the "orthographic similarity" of words, or letter strings, forhuman readers? The answer to this question is essential for modeling wordrecognition processes, as well as for methodological purpose. The hypothesisthat some kind of holistic process contributes to word recognition received somesupporting evidence (Allen & Emerson, 1991; Lété & Pynte, 2003), however,there is also a large amount of empirical evidence that analytical processes playan essential role (McClelland, 1976). As a consequence, most current modelsof word recognition postulate that the access to the mental lexicon is mediatedhal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009by the recognition of component orthographic units such as letters. Given that aword is an ordered sequence of letters, and that human readers candiscriminate anagrams, one must of course assume that some perceptualmechanism takes into account letter order information. There are a priorivarious possible ways of doing this, leading to very different word recognitionmodels. The Interactive Activation Model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), aswell as the Activation-Verification Model (Paap, Newsome, McDonald, &Schvaneveldt, 1982), assumes that the letters are extracted from the visualstimulus by independent and position specific processing channels working inparallel. As a result, the letter codes are also position specific, with theconsequence that the word MEAN = {(M, 1), (E, 2), (A, 3), (N, 4)} and itsanagram NAME = {(N, 1), (A, 2), (M, 3), (E, 4)}, for example, have no commonelements. A major difficulty with this type of approach is that it requires that avisual pre-processing be able to segment the stimulus into portions of imagecorresponding to the component letters to be recognized, before assigning eachportion to the appropriate processing channel. This is possible only if there aretopological or geometrical criteria that allow for suitable segmentation of thestimulus. This is the case if one considers only printed words where letters arenot connected. However, human readers can also read strings of connected