Eye movements when reading words with $YMβOL$ and NUM83R5: There is a cost

Abstract

Recent evidence from masked priming experiments has revealed that readers regularize letter-like symbols and letter-like numbers into their corresponding base letters with minimal processing cost. However, one open question is whether the same pattern occurs when these items are presented during normal silent reading. In the present study, we respond to this question in an eye-movement experiment that included sentences with words that had symbols and numbers as letters, as in “YESTERDAY I SAW THE SECRE74RY WORKING VERY HARD”. Results revealed that there is a greater reading cost associated with letter-by-number replacements than with letter-by-symbol replacements, especially when the replaced letters occur at the beginning of the word. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition and reading.

Keywords:

• Visual word recognition
• Number processing
• Letter processing
• Letter-like characters

Acknowledgements

This research has been partially supported by grants SEJ2006-09238/PSIC, PSI2008-04069/PSIC, and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2008-00048 from the Spanish Government, and grant BFI05.310 from the Basque Government. The authors express their gratitude to Keith Rayner, Hazel Blythe, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments during the reviewing process. Thanks are also due to Margaret Gillon-Dowens for her corrections on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹All the sentences were presented in uppercase, because letter-like symbols and numbers are more physically similar to the corresponding base uppercase letters (M4T3R14L-M▵T€R!▵L-MATERIAL vs. m4t3r14l-m▵t€r!▵l-material; see Perea et al., 2008).

²It should be mentioned that we conducted a parallel study in which participants were presented with sentences that were constructed with at least 50% of the words (see Rayner et al., 2006), which had embedded either words with two letter-like symbols or words with letter-like numbers in beginning or internal letter positions, as in the sentences THE †!NIEST $€CRETARY WAS $€NSIBLE AND ▵†TENTIVE and THE TINI35T SECRE74RY WAS SENS18LE AND ATTEN71VE. Results were parallel to those obtained in the present experiment, showing a greater reading cost associated with sentences with letters substituted by numbers as compared to symbols. There was also a greater reading cost when the letter substitutions were at the beginning of words relative to the letter substitutions in internal positions. However, due to the characteristics of the materials, only global measures (e.g., mean fixation duration, total sentence reading time, mean number of fixations) could be analysed—thereby, we believe that the present study represents a stronger and more powerful test.

³This questionnaire included the critical letters and their associated letter-like symbols (e.g., S-$) or digits (e.g., S-5), together with a set of filler letters, numbers, and symbols. Participants rated the visual similarity between the two characters of each pair on a 1–7 Likert scale. What should be noted here is that an estimated visual similarity rating task may overplay the similarity-driven processes that take place during silent reading when the same characters are presented in a word context.