PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

H H Marmurek

Publications and source records attributed to H H Marmurek.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Limiting lexical activation limits perceptual priming in masked word identification.

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that perceptual priming of a word depends on the prior lexical processing of the word (Rajaram & Roediger, 1993; Weldon, 1991). Experiment 1 showed that first-letter naming reduced priming relative to reading a whole word on two tests: word fragment completion and masked word identification. In Experiment 2, naming the first letter of a word took longer than naming the letter presented alone, and led to better masked word identification. Experiment 3 showed that masked word identification was enhanced by prior word processing more for low frequency words than for high frequency words, but only when words had been read aloud. Experiment 4 tested whether the auditory input accruing from reading a word aloud was the source of facilitation and frequency effects. Participants judged either the frequency of the whole display or the positional frequency of the first letter in the display, and indicated their decisions manually. The major findings from Experiment 3 were replicated, ruling out the cross-modal source of those effects. It was concluded that activation of a lexical unit, one component of word processing (Vriezen, Moscovitch, & Bellos, 1995), is a critical determinant of the perceptual priming of that word.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Episodic effects on the visual comparison of letters in words.

In two experiments, subjects compared the identity of either the first letters of displays or all the letters in displays. Words yielded faster decisions than did pseudowords (pronounceable items derived by changing a vowel in a word) only when entire displays were compared. In a training phase run before the comparison task, subjects had written down either the first letters or entire displays. Relative to items that had not appeared in the training phase, prior experience at writing entire displays facilitated same decisions about entire displays and interfered with different decisions about entire displays. Prior experiences did not moderate the processing of first-letter identities. It was concluded that episodic effects arise from the interaction of higher order information underlying lexical encoding. Prelexical processing of letters is not sensitive to episodic effects.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Familiarity effects and word unitization in visual comparison tasks.

The decision that two words are identical is made more quickly than the decision that two non-words are identical. This familiarity effect was shown to be larger in a simultaneous matching task than in a sequential matching task. In the simultaneous task, two words were not matched as quickly as a single letter and a letter in a predesignated location within a word. The latter finding rules out a perceptual unitization account of the familiarity effect (Silverman, 1985). The familiarity effect was interpreted to be due to the facilitated encoding of a comparison item when a holistic cognitive unit representing the target is activated in memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Identification of words and letters within words.

Three experiments were designed to examine the way letters are identified when they are presented within the context of a word. The first two experiments demonstrated that identification speed is facilitated if the within-word letter position of the target location. If the locational information is specified before the word is displayed (e.g., it is always the first letter), but if the locational information is presented along with the display (e.g., the target position is underlined) reaction time is considerably slower. A model of the identification process was described which assumed that subjects first identify the word, then analyze the contents of all the letter positions in order to encode each letter. Finally, the identification can occur when subjects shift their attention to the target location. If the locational information is given before the display, the attention shift can occur as the letter positions are being analyzed and encoded, but the shift must be delayed until after the analysis if the locational information is part of the display. An implication of the model is that prior to identifying the contents of the target position, the subject should always have an encoding of all the letters in the word, and the results of the third experiment supported that expectation.

Attention↗