At 11:29 AM 10/17/99 -0400, you wrote:
>What I've found every time I do this demo is that few students
>get all 6 Fs OR Ns, but students do seem to count more Ns
>than Fs. Could be a practice effect, or it could be that
>prepositions like ON and IN attract attention more than does
>OF. Or, both hypotheses may have merit. We tend not to
>focus on small words like these, and in such a letter search
>task we may be somewhat influenced by phonology in addition
>to orthography.
There is a fairly extensive literature on letter detection which suggests that the
failure to detect the 'f's in words such as 'of' or 't's such in 'the' is because
when reading we rely on a phonological strategy sounding out the letters in
words.
Thus the f in 'of' is missed because it has a 'ov' sound rather than an 'f'
sound.
'The' produces a 'da' sound.
Here are some rather old references:
Coltheart, M. (1978) Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In G. Underwood (ED.)
Strategies of
information processing. London: Academic Press. Pp. 151-216.
Corcoran, D. W. J. (1966) An acoustic factor in letter cancellation. Nature, 210,
658.
Davies, M. F. (1988) Individual differences in the reading process: field
independence and letter
detection. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 66, 323-326.
Hadely, J. A., & Healy, A. F. (1991) When are reading units larger than the
letter?
Refinement of the
unitization reading model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and
Cognition, 17, 1062-1073.
Rubenstein, H., Lewis, S. S., & Rubenstein, M. A. (1971) Evidence of phonemic
recoding in visual
word recognition. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10,
645-657.
If you do a search of Alice Healy' s work you'll find more recent information on
this effect.
Hope the above is helpful.
<>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <><
Miguel Roig, Ph.D. Voice: (718) 390-4513
Assoc. Prof. of Psychology Fax: (718) 442-3612
Dept. of Psychology [EMAIL PROTECTED]
St. John's University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
300 Howard Avenue http://area51.stjohns.edu/~roig
Staten Island, NY 10301
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