Further evidence for a late locus of holistic word processing: Exploring vertex effect in the word composite task
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Further evidence for a late locus of holistic word processing: Exploring vertex effect in the word composite task Paulo Ventura 1 & João Delgado 1 & José C. Guerreiro 1 & Francisco Cruz 1 & Vivienne Rosário 1 & António Farinha-Fernandes 1 & Miguel Domingues 1 & Ana Margarida Sousa 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Previous studies have shown a rather late and lexical level for holistic word processing. In the present study, we evaluated whether there are early effects in holistic processing of words, taking into consideration the role of lower-level visual processes that are critical in the hierarchy of visual word recognition: the extraction of viewpoint-invariant line junctions/vertices. We used contour-deleted words in two conditions: preservation of the vertices versus preservation of midsegments and an all-contour condition. We found evidence of a composite effect that was equivalent for all materials. Thus, we found no evidence of an early contribution of holistic processing to word recognition, and confirmed that holistic word processing is related to late lexical orthographic representations. Keywords Visual word recognition . Psycholinguistics . Orthography
Introduction Faces are homogeneous visual objects with which we all have extensive experience, but their individuation is crucial in our lives. Holistic processing (Richler, Palmeri, & Gauthier, 2012), or the consideration of all parts together, is at the base of this individuation ability. Holistic processing has also been observed for naturally occurring objects, but only for experts in those objects (e.g., X-rays: Bilalic, Grottenthaler, Nagele, & Lindig, 2014; chessboards: Bilalic, Langner, Ulrich, & Grodd, 2011; fingerprints: Busey & Vanderkolk, 2005; cars: Gauthier, Curran, Curby, & Collins, 2003). Thus, it seems that holistic processing develops through extensive experience. Words are also homogeneous visual objects that are made of a limited set of letters. And, indeed, evidence for holistic processing of words has been found in English words (Wong
João Delgado, José C. Guerreiro, Francisco Cruz, Vivienne Rosário, António Farinha-Fernandes, Miguel Domingues and Ana Margarida Sousa contributed equally to this work. * Paulo Ventura [email protected] 1
Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Alameda da Universidade, 1649-013 Lisbon, Portugal
et al., 2011), Chinese characters (Wong et al., 2012), and Portuguese words (Ventura et al., 2017). Both holistic face and holistic word processing have been studied using a task called the composite paradigm: for example, participants are asked to decide whether the left part of two words presented in sequence is the same while ignoring the right part. Any interference in performance from the irrelevant part on the relevant part indicates automatic and compulsory processing of all parts of the stimuli. In the complete version of this task (Richler & Gauthier, 2014), there are four conditions, including “same” and “different” trials (the critical halves of the tw
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