The Devil’s in the g-Tails: Deficient Letter-Shape Knowledge and Awareness Despite Massive Visual Experience

@article{Wong2018TheDI,
  title={The Devil’s in the g-Tails: Deficient Letter-Shape Knowledge and Awareness Despite Massive Visual Experience},
  author={Kimberly Wong and Frempongma Wadee and Gali Ellenblum and Michael McCloskey},
  journal={Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance},
  year={2018},
  volume={44},
  pages={1324–1335}
}
Knowledge of letter shapes is central to reading. In experiments focusing primarily on a single letter shape—the “looptail” lowercase print G—we found surprising gaps in skilled readers’ knowledge. In Experiment 1 most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g when asked if G has two lowercase print forms, and almost none were able to write looptail g accurately. In Experiment 2 participants searched for Gs in text with multiple looptail gs. Asked immediately thereafter to write… Expand
View on Wolters Kluwer
gwern.net
7 Citations
Background Citations
4

7 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Knowledge about writing influences reading: Dynamic visual information about letter production facilitates letter identification
TLDR
The results demonstrate that information about letter production can be integrated into letter identification, and point to bi-directional connections between stored letter production information (used for writing) and abstract letter identity representations (used in both reading and writing). Expand
Tall towers: Schemas and illusions when perceiving and remembering a familiar building
Correspondence Dillon H. Murphy, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. Email: dmurphy8@ucla.edu Summary We investigated how schemas can bias… Expand
Memory and availability-biased metacognitive illusions for flags of varying familiarity
TLDR
Findings illuminate a persistent metacognitive bias, demonstrate a powerful learning intervention, and extend theories of errorful learning by highlighting the role of attention. Expand
Does the cowl make the monk? Detecting counterfeits in brand names versus logos
TLDR
Results showed a sizeable transposed-letter confusability effect for all types of brand names, but the effect was greatest for the misspelled full logos, which are quite vulnerable to counterfeiting via misspelling branding. Expand
Types of allography
Abstract Variation in writing is highly frequent at both the visual and the functional levels. However, as of yet, the associated notion of allography has not been systematically described. In this… Expand
Functional distributional semantics: learning linguistically informed representations from a precisely annotated corpus
TLDR
A Probabilistic graphical model is defined, which incorporates a probabilistic generalisation of model theory (allowing a strong connection with formal semantics), and which generates semantic dependency graphs (all allowing it to be trained on a corpus). Expand
Functional Distributional Semantics
TLDR
This work proposes a novel probabilistic framework which draws on both formal semantics and recent advances in machine learning, and describes an implementation of this framework using a combination of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and feedforward neural networks. Expand

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 51 REFERENCES
Identity without form: Abstract representations of letters
TLDR
It was found that letter identity was often reported correctly when case was reported incorrectly, even for letters whose upper- and lowercase forms are physically dissimilar (e.g., G-g), consistent with the view that letter identification is an automatic process. Expand
Visual presentation of single letters activates a premotor area involved in writing
TLDR
It is established that the visual presentation of letters activated a part of the left premotor cortex (BA6) that was also activated when the letters were being written by the subjects, which indicates that the writing motor processes are implicitly evoked when passively observing letters. Expand
Feature detection and letter identification
TLDR
It is found that efficiency for letter identification is independent of duration, overall contrast, and eccentricity, and only weakly dependent on size, suggesting that letters are identified by a similar computation across this wide range of viewing conditions. Expand
From graphemes to abstract letter shapes: levels of representation in written spelling.
  • B. Rapp, A. Caramazza
  • Medicine
  • Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
  • 1997
TLDR
The letter substitution errors of 2 dysgraphic subjects who, despite relatively intact oral spelling, made well-formedletter substitution errors in written spelling, were studied and strong support was found for the computation of multiple representational types in the course of written spelling. Expand
The similarity structure of distributed neural responses reveals the multiple representations of letters
TLDR
The approaches applied in this research address various shortcomings of previous studies that have investigated the nature and format of the representations that occur within the various sub-regions of the large-scale networks used in reading and spelling. Expand
Features for Identification of Uppercase and Lowercase Letters
TLDR
It is provided the first empirical evidence that line terminations are the most important features for letter identification, and it is proposed that these small features, represented at several spatial scales, help readers to discriminate among visually similar letters. Expand
Levels of representation, co-ordinate frames, and unilateral neglect
Abstract We describe the performance of a brain-damaged subject, NG, who made reading errors only on the right half of words. This problem persisted even when the subject had demonstrated accurate… Expand
Are there long-term "literal copies" of visually presented words?
  • L. Light, D. Berger
  • Psychology, Medicine
  • Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory
  • 1976
TLDR
Evidence for the hypothesis that the appearance of visually presented words is stored in "literal copy" form is critically evaluated and shown to be inconclusive and a model that assumes that each visual attribute is stored independently in abstract propositional form provided a good quantitative fit to the data. Expand
Handwriting generates variable visual output to facilitate symbol learning.
TLDR
Performance of 5-year-old children on a categorization task involving novel, Greek symbols was measured, suggesting that handwriting facilitates symbol understanding by virtue of its environmental output: supporting the notion of developmental change though brain-body-environment interactions. Expand
Prelexical representations and processes in reading: Evidence from acquired dyslexia
TLDR
A detailed and extensive single-case study of an acquired dyslexic patient, L.H.D.D., who suffered a left-hemisphere lesion as a result of a ruptured aneurysm and whose reading errors stem from a deficit in visual letter identification is reported. Expand
...
1
2
3
4
5
...