Summary
In two experiments, English-Spanish bilinguals read passages, performing letter detection on some passages by circling target letters as they read. Detection passages were sometimes familiarized (primed) by prior reading of the same passage or a translation of it. Participants detected letters in English passages in Experiment 1 and in Spanish passages in Experiment 2. For both experiments, a missing letter effect occurred (depressed detection accuracy on frequent function words relative to less frequent content words). Familiarization promoted overall improvements in letter detection only for English passages, suggesting that reprocessing benefits depend on high language fluency. For Spanish passages, cognates engendered greater error rates than noncognates; the visual similarity of Spanish and English cognates apparently enabled faster identification of Spanish cognates in a way unaffected by familiarization of the whole text passage. Priming by familiarized text was significantly higher when the passages were in the same language than when they were in different languages, suggesting that the reprocessing benefits are at the word level instead of the semantic level. These results are consistent with the GO model of reading (Greenberg, Healy, Koriat, & Kreiner, 2004) but require an expanded consideration of attention redistribution processes in that model.
In two experiments, English-Spanish bilinguals read passages, performing letter detection on some passages by circling target letters as they read. Detection passages were sometimes familiarized (primed) by prior reading of the same passage or a translation of it. Participants detected letters in English passages in Experiment 1 and in Spanish passages in Experiment 2. For both experiments, a missing letter effect occurred (depressed detection accuracy on frequent function words relative to less frequent content words). Familiarization promoted overall improvements in letter detection only for English passages, suggesting that reprocessing benefits depend on high language fluency. For Spanish passages, cognates engendered greater error rates than noncognates; the visual similarity of Spanish and English cognates apparently enabled faster identification of Spanish cognates in a way unaffected by familiarization of the whole text passage. Priming by familiarized text was significantly higher when the passages were in the same language than when they were in different languages, suggesting that the reprocessing benefits are at the word level instead of the semantic level. These results are consistent with the GO model of reading (Greenberg, Healy, Koriat, & Kreiner, 2004) but require an expanded consideration of attention redistribution processes in that model.See the full content of this document
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Familiarization Effects for Bilingual Letter Detection Involving Translation or Exact Text Repetition
When individuals are given the task of reading text and circling every instance of a target letter, it has been found that they make a disproportionately large number of letter detection errors on high-frequency function words like the and in. This "missing letter effect" initially spawned several competing explanations (see Healy, 1994; Koriat & Greenberg, 1994) that recently have been integrated into a more comprehensive GO (Guidance-Organization) model (Greenberg, Healy, Koriat, & Kreiner, 2004). The GO model posits five sources for letter detection errors associated with words being read in context. The first two sources stress perceptual processes: the unitization of a word's perceptual pattern in accord with word frequency, and parafoveal processing differences that are also, though not exclusively, associated with frequency (see also Hadley & Healy, 1991, and Saint-Aubin & Klein, 2001). The third source negotiates a collaborative interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes; it involves contextual constraints that make words more or less predictable. The final two sources reflect postperceptual analyses: A structural precedence that determines the prominence of a word's representation in response to a word's role in a sentence, and the guidance of eye movement in response to the distribution of content information in a text.
Although there has been extensive testing of several of the model's assumptions in the context of letter detection tasks (see Greenberg et al., 2004), the impac: of contextual constraints has received relatively little consideration aside from a few earlier studies. Koriat and Greenberg (1991) tested whether local context that imposes a content or function word interpretation on nonwords affects letter detection, and indeed it did (see also Drewnowski & Healy, 1977, for a demonstration of the significant effect of word context on letter detection errors in frequent function words). However, little attention has been given to whether familiarity with a text's meaning as a whole also impacts letter detection or to the influence of familiarity with the specific arrangement of words that convey the message. The GO model's predictions regarding the impact of familiarization of text on letter detection st...See the full content of this document
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