German Capitalization of Nouns and the Detection of Letters in Continuous Text.

The missing-letter effect refers to the phenomenon that letters are more difficult to detect in common function words (such as the) than in content words. Assuming that the missing-letter effect is diagnostic of the extraction of text structure, we exploited a special feature of German - the convent...

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Publicado en:Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology Vol. 59; no. 3; pp. 143 - 159
Autores principales: Müsseler, Jochen, Nisslein, Monika, Koriat, Asher
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Canadian Psychological Association September 2005
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: September 2005
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      pub: Canadian Psychological Association
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      tig:
        atl: German Capitalization of Nouns and the Detection of Letters in Continuous Text.
      aug:
        au:
          Müsseler, Jochen
          Nisslein, Monika
          Koriat, Asher
      su:
        German language
        Nouns
        Word recognition
        Reading
        Psychology
      sug:
        subj:
          German language
          Nouns
          Word recognition
          Reading
          Psychology
      keyword: German language -- Capitalization
      ab: The missing-letter effect refers to the phenomenon that letters are more difficult to detect in common function words (such as the) than in content words. Assuming that the missing-letter effect is diagnostic of the extraction of text structure, we exploited a special feature of German - the convention to capitalize the initial letter of nouns. Given the great flexibility of word order in German, it was proposed that this convention might help readers specify the structure of the sentence. Therefore orthographic variations that violate the capitalization rules should disrupt structure extraction and should result in a reduced missing-letter effect. The results indicated that: 1) capitalization of function words eliminated the missing-letter effect, but not at the beginning of a sentence; 2) A missing-letter effect occurred when the capitalization of the first letter was correct, but was followed by type case alternation, and also when the size of the initial letters was relatively large for function words, but relatively small for content words. The results were discussed with respect to the possible conurbations of visual familiarity, structural role, and processing time to the missing-letter effect, taking into account that a capitalized initial letter conveys significant information about the word class for German readers. Thus, the present results indicate that readers take advantage not only of function words but of any other infomiation (here the capitalization of nouns) that helps to extract the structure of a sentence. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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