Readers encode absolute letter positions

Joshua Snell*, Joelle Simon

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Reading research has long been concerned with the question of whether the reading brain accesses lexical representations via absolute or relative letter position information. In recent years, important results have been obtained with the flanker lexical decision task. Studies have shown faster decisions about target words (e.g., ‘rock’) when flanked by related letters (‘ro rock ck’) than unrelated letters (‘st rock ep')—and crucially, equal facilitation upon switching flanker positions (‘ck rock ro'), pointing to relative rather than absolute letter position coding. Yet, a later study employing longer targets and flankers yielded detrimental effects of switching flanker positions. In order to get a better grasp on the equivocal evidence thus far, here we carried out an extensive test of flanker relatedness and position effects, using various target and flanker lengths, all within a single experiment. We observed a clear reduction of flanker relatedness effects upon switching flanker positions, and this held true across target and flanker lengths. The present results unambiguously suggest that lexical access is driven by absolute letter position information, and furthermore, are accurately predicted by the recent PONG model (Snell, 2024b).

Original languageEnglish
Article number105960
Pages (from-to)1-7
Number of pages7
JournalCognition
Volume254
Early online date17 Sept 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Authors

Keywords

  • Letter position coding
  • Orthographic processing
  • Reading
  • Visual word recognition

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