ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 31 / 40as from more complex units, such as open-bigrams or phonological codes, orany other units that encode the order information. According to the hierarchicalcomplexity organization principle of Neocognitron type models, we assume thatsmall units such as position-free letters are available sooner, in the perceptualanalysis of a stimulus, than more complex units (bigrams, phonological codes).We note, however, that the hypothesis of multi-letter units can as well bereplaced by another way of encoding the order information, provided that theletter codes themselves remain position-free, and available sooner than orderinformation. Now, how can we understand the observed effects in such ahal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009theoretical framework? Given that frequent words have many chances to belearned before infrequent words, the big brothers are in general the mostfrequent words. If an infrequent word has at least one big brother, then itreceives a large part of its activation from the stimulus by the intermediate ofthe big brother nodes, while if it does not have big brothers then it is directlyactivated by the perceptual analysis of the stimulus. The delay introduced bythe big brother node mediation can explain the "anagram frequency effect"(Exp. 1), as well as the well known "neighborhood frequency effect". Nowassume that a prime that is anagram of two words is presented. The mostfrequent anagram word is activated by position-free letter nodes, and then itprovides activation to the less frequent anagram, while the order informationdirectly provides a reduced amount of inhibition to the less frequent anagramnode given that this one is poorly connected to the perceptual analyzers.Depending on the relative amount of activation and inhibition it received, theless frequent anagram node can be in various states when the correspondingword is actually presented. The situation is different for an infrequent word thatdoes not have big brothers because its node is richly connected to theperceptual analyzers. Thus when the anagram prime is presented, the nodereceives some activation from position-free letter nodes, and then it receives a