Abstract
Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as ‘d’, but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as ‘b’, thus indicating that the directionality of the reversal letters cannot be disregarded when examining the cost of suppressing the mirror-generalization mechanism at the early stages of visual word recognition. Here we examined whether this bias can also be observed for left-oriented non-reversal letters such as ‘g’, ‘j’, and ‘z’, which just as ‘d’ are also prone to errors in writing in left-to-right orthographies as European Portuguese (EP). Thirty-six EP skilled readers performed a lexical decision task combined with a masked-priming paradigm in which target words containing either left-oriented (e.g., ‘g’, genial) or right-oriented (e.g., ‘c’, casual) non-reversal letters were preceded by 50 ms primes that could be the same as the target (genial–genial, casual–casual), nonword primes in which the critical letter was replaced by the mirror-image of the left- or right-oriented non-reversal letter (
enial–genial, 
asual–casual), or nonword primes in which the critical letter was replaced by the mirror-image of another left-oriented or right-oriented non-reversal letter as control (
enial-genial, 
asual-casual). Results showed that the amount of priming produced by identity primes and mirror-image primes was virtually the same for words with left-oriented (e.g., genial–genial =
enial–genial), but not for words with right-oriented non-reversal letters (e.g., casual–casual >
asual–casual), hence extending the right-oriented bias observed for words containing reversal letters to words containing non-reversal letters.
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Notes
The uppercase letter created by Rumelhart and Siple (1974) is a highly artificial font where letters are defined by a set of 14 straight-line segments or “quanta”. Each letter is coded according to the presence (1)/absence (0) of each these segments according to its position, so that each letter is represented by a binary pattern such as 01111010100001.
To classify letters as facing right or left, Treiman et al. (2014) asked participants (college students) to decide whether each of the 52 uppercase and lowercase letters faced ‘left’, faced ‘right’, or was ‘neutral’, circling the corresponding answer on an answer sheet. The results showed that, in lowercase, the letter forms for which the most popular response was ‘left’ were (the number in parentheses indicates the proportion of ‘left’ responses): ‘a’ (.85), ‘d’ (.94), ‘g’ (1.00), ‘j’ (.97), ‘q’ (.88), ‘y’ (.91), and ‘z’ (.66); whereas the letter forms for which the most popular response was ‘right’ were: ‘b’ (.91), ‘c’ (.94), ‘e’ (.94), ‘f’ (1.00), ‘h’ (.88), ‘k’ (1.00), ‘n’ (.58), ‘p’ (.94), ‘r’ (1.00), and ‘s’ (.73). In the remaining cases, the most popular answer was that the letter form was neutral.
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Acknowledgements
This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), University of Minho, and supported by the Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028212 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds, and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement.
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Appendix: Words and pseudowords used in the experiment
Appendix: Words and pseudowords used in the experiment
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Soares, A.P., Lages, A., Velho, M. et al. The mirror reflects more for genial than for casual: right-asymmetry bias on the visual word recognition of words containing non-reversal letters. Read Writ 34, 1467–1489 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10100-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10100-x