Abstract
ABSTRACT Expert readers have a wide tolerance for distortions of the letters that make up a word. Nevertheless, the limits of this invariance are still under debate. To scrutinise this issue, we focused on a single parameter, letter rotation, as it serves to disentangle the predictions from neurally-inspired models of word recognition. Whereas the Local-Combination-Detector (LCD) model predicts invariance up to 45°, the SERIOL model predicts a linear cost until 60°. To test these predictions, Experiments 1 and 2 employed four rotation angles (0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°) in lexical decision and semantic categorisation. The cost was minimal at 22.5°, sizeable at 45°, and considerably large at 67.5°. In Experiment 3, we focused on four moderate rotation angles (<45°). We found a gradual reading cost that increased at 45°. Thus, while there is a resilience limit around 45° favouring LCD, less steep angles also produce a reading cost, backing the SERIOL model.
Published Version
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