The development of lexical representations: evidence from the position of the diverging letter effect

The developmental trend of transposed letters effects in masked priming

In the current study, we investigated the development of transposed letter (TL) priming effects with masked priming. Recent studies have reported different and contrasting results concerning the age at which TL priming effects first appear and whether they tend to decline or increase with age. One of the aims of this study was to investigate the developmental trend of orthographic mechanisms underlying the TL effects in Italian. We tested three groups of children (second, third, and fifth graders) and a group of adults with a sandwich masked priming procedure, presenting lists of target words preceded by TL or replaced letter (RL) primes. TLs and RLs were either at the beginning (second-third letters) or the end (fourth-sixth letters) of primes in order to see whether the TL priming effect varied according to position in the letter string. We found that TL priming effects increased with age in both accuracy and latency. No effect of position was found. The results are discussed in light of a possible difference in the development of orthographic mechanisms depending on the transparency of the language.

Serial mechanism in transposed letters effects: A developmental study

The study describes the developmental trend of transposed letters (TL) effects in a lexical decision task. The TL effect refers to the fact that nonwords derived from words by transposing two middle letters (e.g., talbe from table) are responded to more slowly than control nonwords in which two letters are replaced (RL [replaced letters]; e.g., tafde). We measured this effect in three groups of children (second, third, and fifth graders) and a group of adults. Length was manipulated with short letter strings (four or five letters) and long letter strings (seven or eight letters). In long letter strings, position of letter transposition/replacement was also manipulated; half of the stimuli contained the TL/RL toward the beginning of the string and half toward the end of the string. The results showed that the size of the TL effect increased with age and that this developmental pattern was more marked for transpositions involving the final part of the word. The results suggest that with the increase in reading ability, the reading system relies more strongly on a coarse orthographic representation in which letter position is not precisely coded. Furthermore, the effect of position suggests that a serial mechanism is used to scan the letter string. This determines the extent to which nonwords activate the base words, modulating the influence of lexical effects in nonword decisions. The nature of this effect is discussed.

"I can read these colors." orthographic manipulations and the development of the color-word stroop

The color-word Stroop is a popular measure in psychological assessments. Evidence suggests that Stroop performance relies heavily on reading, an ability that improves over childhood. One way to influence reading proficiency is by orthographic manipulations. To determine the degree of interference posed by orthographic manipulations with development, in addition to standard color-Words (purple) we manipulated letter-positions: First/last letter in correct place (prulpe) and Scrambled (ulrpep). We tested children 7–16 years (n = 128) and adults (n = 23). Analyses showed that Word- and First/last-incongruent were qualitatively similar, whereas Word-congruent was different than other conditions. Results suggest that for children and adults, performance was hindered the most for incongruent and incorrectly spelled words and was most facilitated when words were congruent with the ink color and correctly spelled. Implications on visual word recognition and reading are discussed.