Marta Vergara-Martínez

Para lectores expertos, la lectura es un proceso sencillo y automatizado que facilita el acceso al significado. No obstante, todos los lectores pasamos primero por una etapa donde dicho proceso era costoso y conllevaba esfuerzo. Esta transición se debe al empleo de diferentes estrategias lectoras. Mientras que durante el aprendizaje empleamos una estrategia alfabética/serial, una vez ganamos automaticidad, empleamos la lectura paralela. Como expertos, en función de las demandas ortográficas de cada estímulo, el lector hará uso de una u otra estrategia para facilitar el acceso léxico. Son múltiples los factores perceptivos que difieren en cada palabra que leemos. Por ejemplo, podemos ver una misma palabra presentada así, así, ASÍ o así. Aunque al inicio somos más sensibles a estos cambios perceptivos, con el desarrollo lector ganamos cierta tolerancia. Sin embargo, ¿ocurre lo mismo en población con dislexia? En este trabajo, realizamos una revisión teórica sobre los factores perceptivos en la lectura y su impacto en la dislexia.

In recent studies with the masked priming lexical decision task, matched-case identity-priming effects occur for nonwords but not for words (e.g., nonwords: ERTAR-ERTAR faster than ertar-ERTAR; words: ALTAR-ALTAR produces similar response times as altar-ALTAR). This dissociation is thought to result from lexical feedback influencing orthographic representations in word processing. As nonwords do not receive this feedback, bottom-up processing of prime–target integration leads to matched-case effects. However, the underlying mechanism of this effect in nonwords remains unclear. In this study, we added a color congruency manipulation across the prime and target in the matched-case identity-priming design. We aimed to determine whether the case effects originate at the early stages of prime–target perceptual integration or due to bottom-up activation of case-specific letter detectors. Results replicated the previous dissociation between words and nonwords regarding the matched-case identity effect. Additionally, we did not find any modulation of these effects by prime–target color congruency. These findings suggest that the locus of the matched-case identity effect is at an orthographic level of representation that encodes case information.

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the two-choice procedures during visual word recognition, we examined the impact of a lexical factor (word frequency) in a lexical-decision task by tracking event-related potential (ERP) waves. If the differences across response procedures influence relatively early lexical processing stages, we would expect word frequency to induce differences across tasks in the early epochs of the ERP. Alternatively, if the differences across response procedures only occur at a postaccess response selection stage, we would only expect differences across procedures in late time windows of the ERP. Results showed that the word-frequency effect occurred earlier (starting around 200 ms poststimuli) in the go/no-go than in the two-choice response procedure. These results support the view of a largely flexible cognitive network in which a subtle manipulation of the response procedure can affect early components of processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

It has been proposed that poor reading abilities in deaf readers might be related to weak connections between the orthographic and lexical-semantic levels of processing. Here we used event related potentials (ERPs), known for their excellent time resolution, to examine whether lexical feedback modulates early orthographic processing. Twenty congenitally deaf readers made lexical decisions to target words and pseudowords. Each of those target stimuli could be preceded by a briefly presented matched-case or mismatched-case identity prime (e.g., ALTAR-ALTAR vs. altar- ALTAR). Results showed an early effect of case overlap at the N/P150 for all targets. Critically, this effect disappeared for words but not for pseudowords, at the N250—an ERP component sensitive to orthographic processing. This dissociation in the effect of case for word and pseudowords targets provides strong evidence of early automatic lexical-semantic feedback modulating orthographic processing in deaf readers. Interestingly, despite the dissociation found in the ERP data, behavioural responses to words still benefited from the physical overlap between prime and target, particularly in less skilled readers and those with less experience with words. Overall, our results support the idea that skilled deaf readers have a stronger connection between the orthographic and the lexical-semantic levels of processing.

Most words in books and digital media are written in lowercase. The primacy of this format has been brought out by different experiments showing that common words are identified faster in lowercase (e.g., molecule) than in uppercase (MOLECULE). However, there are common words that are usually written in uppercase (street signs, billboards; e.g., STOP, PHARMACY). We conducted a lexical decision experiment to examine whether the usual letter-case configuration (uppercase vs. lowercase) of common words modulates word identification times. To this aim, we selected 78 molecule-type words and 78 PHARMACY-type words that were presented in lowercase or uppercase. For molecule-type words, the lowercase format elicited faster responses than the uppercase format, whereas this effect was absent for PHARMACY-type words. This pattern of results suggests that the usual letter configuration of common words plays an important role during visual word processing.

The examination of how we read handwritten words (i.e., the original form of writing) has typically been disregarded in the literature on reading. Previous research using word recognition tasks has shown that lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) are magnified when reading difficult handwritten words. To examine this issue in a more ecological scenario, we registered the participants’ eye movements when reading handwritten sentences that varied in the degree of legibility (i.e., sentences composed of words in easy vs. difficult handwritten style). For comparison purposes, we included a condition with printed sentences. Results showed a larger reading cost for sentences with difficult handwritten words than for sentences with easy handwritten words, which in turn showed a reading cost relative to the sentences with printed words. Critically, the effect of word frequency was greater for difficult handwritten words than for easy handwritten words or printed words in the total times on a target word, but not on first-fixation durations or gaze durations. We examine the implications of these findings for models of eye movement control in reading.