Visual information and redundancy in reading.

Previous studies have demonstrated that a letter is better identified when embedded in a valid spelling pattern than when presented alone. The present results replicated earlier findings in a paradigm that controls for redundancy by presenting the response alternatives after the stimulus presentation. However, this study failed to find an effect of visual similarity. This result suggests that presenting the alternatives right after the stimulus presentation does not control for redundancy since alternatives are eliminated during perception of the stimulus, not after the visual information has been completely analyzed. Identification was, therefore, examined in a task in which 5s were given the letter and word alternatives prior to the experimental session. This task eliminated the spelling pattern advantage and also provided evidence for visual similarity effects in letter and word identification. The findings are consonant with a visual identification process that analyzes visual features of letters in both letter and word recognition. Although the study of reading has had a long history (Cattell, 1886; Huey, 1908; Woodworth, 1938), there is no generally acceptable account of the processes involved in letter and word recognition. One possible reason for this may be the confounding of visual and higher order information in many visual recognition experiments. With efforts aimed at studying the visual information available in a visual display, investigators have not adequately controlled for higher order psychological processes. Consequently, inferences drawn from these studies are based on results confounded by an interaction of at least two processes. Identifying the processes that are involved in discriminating and classifying a visual configuration requires a distinction between two sources of information available to the reader. The first consists of perceptual information that is directly available from the visual configuration of letters and words. The second! source is the readers knowledge of the valid letter sequences that can occur in words. This source of higher order information (sometimes called redundancy) reduces the pos-1 This research is based on a masters thesis carried out by the first author under the direction of the second author.