Perea, M., Moret-Tatay, C., & Gómez, P. (2011). The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition. Acta Psychologica, 137(3), 345-351.

Perea, M.; Moret-Tatay, C.; Gómez, P.

2011

Perea, M., Moret-Tatay, C., & Gómez, P. (2011). The effects of interletter spacing in visual-word recognition. Acta Psychologica, 137(3), 345-351.

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Despite the importance of determining the effects of interletter spacing on visual-word recognition, this issue has often been neglected in the literature. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on this topic. The rationale is that a thin increase in interletter spacing, as in cas ino, may reduce lateral interference among internal letters without destroying a word's integrity and/or allow a more precise encoding of a word's letter positions. Here we examined whether identification times for word stimuli in a lexical decision task were faster when the target word had a slightly wider than default interletter spacing value relative to the default settings (e.g., cas ino vs. casino). In Experiment 1, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word-frequency, whereas in Experiment 2, we examined whether interletter spacing interacted with word length. Results showed that responses to words using a thin increase in interletter spacing were faster than the responses to words using the default settings – regardless of word-frequency and word length. Thus, interletter spacing plays an important role at modulating the identification of visually presented words.

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