7 - Primary and Secondary Recognition in Reading

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the primary and secondary recognition of letters, letter strings, and words. The primary and secondary recognition processes are represented along with their appropriate memory structures. Preperceptual visual storage holds the visual features detected during a single eye fixation. The primary recognition process operates to transform these features into a sequence of letters, punctuation, and spaces in synthesized visual memory. The primary recognition process operates on a number of letters simultaneously. The visual features read out at each spatial location define a set of possible letters for that position. The recognition process chooses from this candidate set the letter alternative that not only has a high correspondence in terms of visual features but also is probable in that particular context. The primary recognition process is, therefore, dependent on both the visual information in preperceptual storage and knowledge about the probabilities of letter strings held in long-term memory. The interaction of these two sources of information is a critical issue in the analysis of word recognition. The secondary recognition process operates to transform the visual information into meaning. The visual information made available by the primary recognition process, and syntactic and semantic expectancies operate hand in hand in the abstraction of meaning.