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Abstract
The effect of letter reversal on the detection of Gestalt patterns was investigated by recording a short latency brain wave response known as the recognition potential (RP). The native language of 12 subjects was English. It was Chinese for 12 others. Three hypotheses were tested. (1) Strings of identical characters displayed on a background of dissimilar characters will evoke the RP. (2) RP latency will be less for normal letter targets than for reversed letter targets. (3) The letter reversal effect will be greater for subjects having longer experience with alphabetical characters. The hypotheses were confirmed. Similar effects of letter reversal were also found for longer latency electrophysiological responses and for behavioral reaction time (RT). The RP latency difference equaled the RT difference. This suggested that letter specific processes operated rapidly, not later, than the latency of the RP, and any subsequent processing had no differential effect on RT.