The nature of abstract orthographic codes: evidence from masked priming and magnetoencephalography.

ABSTRACT: What kind of mental objects are letters? Research on letter perception has mainly focussed on the visual properties of letters, showing that orthographic representations are abstract and size/shape invariant. But given that letters are, by definition, mappings between symbols and sounds, what is the role of sound in orthographic representation? We present two experiments suggesting that letters are fundamentally sound-based representations. To examine the role of sound in orthographic representation, we took advantage of the multiple scripts of Japanese. We show two types of evidence that if a Japanese word is presented in a script it never appears in, this presentation immediately activates the ("actual") visual word form of that lexical item. First, equal amounts of masked repetition pri

SUBMITTER: Pylkkanen L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2876033 | biostudies-literature | 2010 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature