Haskins Publications

Number	934
Year	1994
Drawer	17
Entry Date	07/14/1998
Authors	Mattingly, Ignatius G., Xu Yi.
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Publication	Advances in the Study of Chinese Language Processing, 1.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0934.pdf
Abstract	In a line of research that began with Cattell (1886), it has been demonstrated that words play a special role in the recognition of text. A letter string that forms a word is recognized faster and more accurately than a nonword string; a letter is recognized faster and more accurately if it is presented as part of a word than if it is presented alone or as part of nonword (e.g. Reicher, 1969; for a review, see Henderson, 1982). This constellation of findings, often referred to as “word superiority”, suggests that the reader does not simply process the text letter by letter, and that words are crucial. The letters in a word are processed so automatically that the reader is unaware of recognizing them, and when he is required to report a letter presented in a word, he finds it most efficient to infer the identity of the letter from that of the word.
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