Word Superiority in Chinese

I Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut ! I 1 In a line of research that began with Cattell (1886). it has been demonstrated that words play a special role in the recognition of text. A letter string that forms a word is recognized faster and more accurately than a nonword string; a letter is recognized faster and more accurately if it is presented as part of a word than if it is presented alone or as part of nonword (e.g., Reicher, 1969; for a review, see Hender1 son, 1982). This constellation of findings, often referred to as "word superiority", suggests that the reader docs not simply process the text letter by letter, and that words are crucial. The letters in a word are processed so automatically that the reader is unaware of recognizing them, and when he is required to report a letter presented in a word, he finds it most efficient to infer the identity of the letter from that of the word.