Abstract
In an experiment measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs), single-letter targets were preceded by briefly presented masked letter primes. Name and case consistency were manipulated across primes and targets so that the prime was either the same letter as the target (or not), and was presented in the same case as the target (or not). Separate analyses were performed for letters whose upper- and lowercase forms had similar features (or not). The results revealed an effect of prime-target visual similarity between 120 and 180 msec, an effect of case-specific letter identity between 180 and 220 msec, and an effect of case-independent letter identity between 220 and 300 msec. We argue that these ERP results reflect processing in a hierarchical system for letter recognition that involves both case-specific and case-independent representations of alphabetic stimuli.
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The first author was supported by a grant from the French Ministry of Education. P.J.H. and K.J.M. were supported by NICHD Grants HD2589 and HD04351.
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Petit, JP., Midgley, K.J., Holcomb, P.J. et al. On the time course of letter perception: A masked priming ERP investigation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13, 674–681 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193980
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193980