Severe processing capacity limits for sub-lexical features of letter strings.

ABSTRACT: When reading, the visual system is confronted with many words simultaneously. How much of that information can a reader process at once? Previous studies demonstrated that low-level visual features of multiple words are processed in parallel, but lexical attributes are processed serially, for one word at a time. This implies that an internal bottleneck lies somewhere between early visual and lexical analysis. We used a dual-task behavioral paradigm to investigate whether this bottleneck lies at the stage of letter recognition or phonological decoding. On each trial, two letter strings were flashed briefly, one above and one below fixation, and then masked. In the letter identification experiment, participants indicated whether a vowel was present in a particular letter string. In the phono

SUBMITTER: Campbell M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10805793 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature