Spanish Journal of Psychology, in press Does bold emphasis facilitate the process of visual-word recognition?

Does bold emphasis facilitate the process of visual-word recognition? Abstract The study of the effects of typographical factors on lexical access has been rather neglected in the literature on visual-word recognition. Indeed, current computational models of visual-word recognition employ an unrefined letter feature level in their coding schemes. In a letter recognition experiment, Pelli, Burns, Farell, and Moore-Page (2006), letters in Bookman boldface produced more efficiency (i.e., a higher ratio of thresholds of an ideal observer versus a human observer) than the letters in Bookman regular under visual noise. Here we examined whether the effect of bold emphasis can be generalized to a common visual-word recognition task (lexical decision: " is the item a word? ") under standard viewing conditions. Each stimulus was presented either with or without bold emphasis (e.g., actor vs. actor). To help determine the locus of the effect of bold emphasis, word-frequency (low vs. high) was also manipulated. Results revealed that responses to words in boldface were faster than the responses to the words without emphasis –this advantage was restricted to low-frequency words. Thus, typographical features play a non-negligible role during visual-word recognition and, hence, the letter feature level of current models of visual-word recognition should be amended. 3 Despite its potential importance, the role of typographic factors has usually been disregarded in the literature on visual-word recognition and reading (see Tinker, 1963, for a review of early research on typography and reading, and Sanocki & Dyson, 2012, for a recent review). Indeed, most current computational models of visual-word interactive activation model: McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) still employ the uppercase font designed by Rumelhart and Siple (1974), in which each letter is formed by fourteen straight segments, as in , etc. One reason for the lack of specification of the feature letter level in these models is that " there are still many questions that need to be resolved in mapping features onto letters " (Balota, Yap, & Cortese, 2006, p. 289). Although researchers on lexical access have implicitly assumed that all relevant lexical/sublexical effects recent evidence that shows that subtle manipulations of perceptual/typographical factors play a non-negligible role in visual-word recognition and reading (e.g., letter spacing: In the present experiment, we examined whether bold emphasis (i.e., actor vs. actor) affects the processing of visually presented words. When reading a text, a word can be written in boldface to attract attention to that word. Thus, a …