Abstract
Smith (1969) and Smith, Lott, & Cronnell (1969) claimed that word identification was not impaired by printing the characters making up a word in a mixture of cases. If this were so, it would rule out such word-identification models as the “more-features” model of Wheeler (1970) and Rumelhart & Siple (1972). The experimental methods used by Smith et al are criticized. A straightforward word-identification experiment revealed that case alternation does, in fact, lead to a large impairment of word identification, as would be predicted by models of word identification based on multiletter visual features.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kucera, H., & Francis, W. N. Computational analysis of present-day American English. P ovidence: Brown University Press, 1967.
Morton, J. The effects of content upon speed of reading, eye movements and eye-voice span. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1964, 16, 340–355.
Reicher, G. M. Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1969, 81, 275–280.
Rumelhart, D. E., & Siple, P. The process of recognizing tachistoscopically presented words. Center for Human Information Processing Technical Report No. 27, University of California, San Diego, 1972.
Smith, F. Familiarity of configuration vs discriminability of features in the visual identification of words. Psychonomic Science, 1969, 14, 261–262.
Smith, F., Lott, D., & Cronnell, B. The effect of type size and case alternation on word identification. American Journal of Psychology, 1969, 82, 248–253.
Thompson, M. C., & Massaro, D. W. Visual information and redundancy in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1973, 98, 49–54.
Wheeler, D. D. Processes in word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 1970, 1, 59–85.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
We are greatly indebted to Charles Downing for providing the computer program used to carry out this experiment.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Coltheart, M., Freeman, R. Case alternation impairs word identification. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 3, 102–104 (1974). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333407
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333407