Short Article: Lexically Guided Retuning of Letter Perception

Abstract

Participants made visual lexical decisions to upper-case words and nonwords, and then categorized an ambiguous N–H letter continuum. The lexical decision phase included different exposure conditions: Some participants saw an ambiguous letter “?”, midway between N and H, in N-biased lexical contexts (e.g., REIG?), plus words with unambiguous H (e.g., WEIGH); others saw the reverse (e.g., WEIG?, REIGN). The first group categorized more of the test continuum as N than did the second group. Control groups, who saw “?” in nonword contexts (e.g., SMIG?), plus either of the unambiguous word sets (e.g., WEIGH or REIGN), showed no such subsequent effects. Perceptual learning about ambiguous letters therefore appears to be based on lexical knowledge, just as in an analogous speech experiment (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003) which showed similar lexical influence in learning about ambiguous phonemes. We argue that lexically guided learning is an efficient general strategy available for exploitation by different specific perceptual tasks.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bowers

J. S.

(1999). The visual categories of letters and words reside outside any informationally encapsulated perceptual system. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, 368–369.

Eimas

P. D.

Corbit

J. D.

(1973). Selective adaptation of linguistic feature detectors. Cognitive Psychology 4, 99–109.

Eisner

McQueen

J. M.

(2005). The specificity of perceptual learning in speech processing. Perception & Psychophysics 67, 224–238.

Eisner

McQueen

J. M.

(2006). Perceptual learning in speech: Stability over time. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119, 1950–1953.

Forster

K. I.

Forster

J. C.

(2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instrumentation and Computers 35, 116–124.

Kraljic

Samuel

A. G.

(2005). Perceptual learning for speech: Is there a return to normal?. Cognitive Psychology 51, 141–178.

Kraljic

Samuel

A. G.

(in press). Generalization in perceptual learning for speech. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Macromedia Fontographer. (4th ed.). San Francisco October1996[Computer program], Author.

Massaro

D. W.

(1979). Letter information and orthographic context in word perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 5, 595–609.

10.

McClelland

J. L.

Elman

J. L.

(1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology 18, 1–86.

11.

McClelland

J. L.

Rumelhart

D. E.

(1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of the basic findings. Psychological Review 88, 375–407.

12.

McQueen

J. M.

Cutler

Norris

Perceptual learning in speech generalises over words

Paper presented at the 9th Wintercongres of the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychonom. Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands December 2003.

13.

McQueen

J. M.

Cutler

Norris

(in press). Phonological abstraction in the mental lexicon. Cognitive Science.

14.

Norris

McQueen

J. M.

Cutler

(2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology 47, 204–238.

15.

Repp

B. H.

Liberman

A. L.

(1987). Phonetic category boundaries are flexible. Categorical perception. Harnad

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 89–112.

16.

Samuel

A. G.

(1986). Red herring detectors and speech perception: In defense of selective adaptation. Cognitive Psychology 18, 452–499.