Word superiority effect

The word superiority effect states that a reader all the words of a language faster and with a smaller error rate recognizes as indipendent letters and nonwords ( random character combinations ) which are composed of the same letters. Letters are therefore easier to identify within a word, as if they are individually or masked (for example, within a sequence of letters such as XXXXXX ) are offered. Word recognition therefore runs smoother. This finding is the main proof of the dynamic and active property of speech perception.

If the processing is visual information very efficiently, processing written language is also organized by the word superiority effect. The efficiency of the reading process is measured by the reading speed. The reader reads an average of 250-300 words per minute. Per word, this results in a period of only 200-300 milliseconds.

The word superiority effect is more pronounced than at shorter with longer sequences of letters. This is also at a longer latency period between presentation of the stimulus and the response choice. It follows that the most striking difference between the processing of words and reception of other visual stimuli is that the brain transmits words faster into an efficient storage mode. In this case, it is assumed that the character string is mapped to already stored language structures. Those structures can firstly be stored in the internal lexicon words. Second, the translation process can also be a productive system that the formation of new forms in a language allowing ( an explanation of the pseudoword superiority ). The phonological recoding represents one of the ways to transfer

Common words do not show superiority over less frequent.

Test setup

Result

Swell

• Günther H.: Studies on visual word recognition. 1983, 1-190
• Helmut Glück ( ed.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache. 2000
• Study by Meyer and Schvaneveldt 1971