Abstract
Starting from the hypothesis that printed word identification initially involves the parallel mapping of visual features onto location-specific letter identities, we analyze the type of information that would be involved in optimally mapping this location-specific orthographic code onto a location-invariant lexical code. We assume that some intermediate level of coding exists between individual letters and whole words, and that this involves the representation of letter combinations. We then investigate the nature of this intermediate level of coding given the constraints of optimality. This intermediate level of coding is expected to compress data while retaining as much information as possible about word identity. Information conveyed by letters is a function of how much they constrain word identity and how visible they are. Optimization of this coding is a combination of minimizing resources (using the most compact representations) and maximizing information. We show that in a large proportion of cases, non-contiguous letter sequences contain more information than contiguous sequences, while at the same time requiring less precise coding. Moreover, we found that the best predictor of human performance in orthographic priming experiments was within-word ranking of conditional probabilities, rather than average conditional probabilities. We conclude that from an optimality perspective, readers learn to select certain contiguous and non-contiguous letter combinations as information that provides the best cue to word identity.
Highlights
When trying to understand the functioning of cognitive architectures, important insights can be obtained by studying characteristics of the task and the constraints they place on the processing system
Analysis 1: Information values of letter combinations – Minimal substrings to identify words For a reading system aiming at the compression of data while maximizing the information retained, is it beneficial to code for non-contiguous letter combinations? To answer this question, we identified the shortest ordered letter subset that uniquely identifies words
The stimulus-specific relative information is perhaps more critical than the absolute measure of informativeness. In this theoretical note, we investigated the nature of the orthographic code that subserves the parallel mapping of location-specific letter identities onto location-invariant lexical representations
Summary
When trying to understand the functioning of cognitive architectures, important insights can be obtained by studying characteristics of the task and the constraints they place on the processing system. Children learning letter identities typically go through a mirror stage in which they can write indifferently in both directions (Walsh and Butler, 1996). In this line, Dehaene et al (2010) have recently presented behavioral and fMRI data showing that mirror-invariance is present for pictures in a masked mirror priming paradigm, while this was not the case for words, under the assumption that once a certain level of reading experience is attained, mirror writing and/or reading is no longer an automatic spontaneous process
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