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Adaptive Changes in the Grain-size of Word Recognition

The regularity effect for printed word recognition and naming depends on ambiguities between single letters (small grain-size) and their phonemic values. As a given word is repeated and becomes more familiar, letter-aggregate size (grain-size) is predicted to increase, thereby decreasing the ambiguity between spelling pattern and phonological representation and, therefore, decreasing the regularity effect. Lexical decision and naming tasks studied the effect of repetition on the regularity effect for words. The familiarity of a word from was manipulated by presenting low and high frequency words as well as by presenting half the stimuli in mixed upper- and lowercase letters (an unfamiliar form) and half in uniform case. In lexical decision, the regularity effect was initially strong for low frequency words but became null after two presentations; in naming it was also initially strong but was merely reduced (although still substantial) after three repetitions. Mixed case words were recognized and named more slowly and tended to show stronger regularity effects. The results were consistent with the primary hypothesis that familiar word forms are read faster because they are processed at a larger grain-size, which requires fewer operations to achieve lexical selection. Results are discussed in terms of a neurobiological model of word recognition based on brain imaging studies.