Abstract
Perceptual expertise has been studied intensively with faces and object categories involving detailed individuation. A common finding is that experience in fulfilling the task demand of fine, subordinate-level discrimination between highly similar instances is associated with the development of holistic processing. This study examines whether holistic processing is also engaged by expert word recognition, which is thought to involve coarser, basic-level processing that is more part-based. We adopted a paradigm widely used for faces – the composite task, and found clear evidence of holistic processing for English words. A second experiment further showed that holistic processing for words was sensitive to the amount of experience with the language concerned (native vs. second-language readers) and with the specific stimuli (words vs. pseudowords). The adoption of a paradigm from the face perception literature to the study of expert word perception is important for further comparison between perceptual expertise with words and face-like expertise.
Highlights
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the study of perceptual expertise for different object categories, such as faces [1,2], cars [3,4], fingerprints [5], music notes [6], and novel computer-generated objects [7,8]
We focus on reporting the statistics on Response times (RT), because (i) the overall sensitivity was very high (A’ = .959); and (ii) sensitivity measures showed a similar result pattern as RT though were less sensitive to differences among conditions
We showed robust holistic processing for words: matching target parts of a word was interfered by the irrelevant parts, and such interference was reduced when the parts were misaligned
Summary
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the study of perceptual expertise for different object categories, such as faces [1,2], cars [3,4], fingerprints [5], music notes [6], and novel computer-generated objects [7,8]. If holistic processing depends on our experience with the individual stimuli, we should expect holistic processing to be the largest for high-frequency words and the smallest for pseudowords Such modulation by word type should be apparent for the native English readers due to their extensive experience with English words. For ESL readers, though they were fluent in English reading, the majority of their reading experience involved Chinese rather than English Their experience with English was much less than that for native readers, and any differences in holistic processing among word types may only emerge after more extensive experience with the language. We expect the different word types should have a smaller or no effect on holistic processing for ESL readers
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