Temporal Integration of English Words: Evidence for a Processing Hierarchy in Visual Word Recognition

Several models of visual word recognition suggest a processing hierarchy; basic orthographic features are processed early and whole-word representations are processed late in the hierarchy. Unfortunately, given the extreme efficiency of the visual word recognition system, studies typically focus on one specific level of the processing hierarchy (e.g., orthographic, phonological and/or semantic processing). Furthermore, different paradigms are used to study different levels of the hierarchy. Fortunately, data across different studies in the literature do converge to two distinct temporal thresholds for letter perception and whole-word integration. The current experiments assessed the temporal thresholds for both letter perception and whole-word integration using a single novel paradigm. The results demonstrated distinct temporal thresholds for letter perception and whole-word integration which agree with those reported in the literature. Thus, the current experiments provide further behavioral evidence that the visual word recognition is a hierarchical process.MAS