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Local perception impairs the lexical reading route

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Abstract

Human perception of a visual scene is hierarchically organized. Such rapid, albeit coarse, global processing allows people to create a useful context in which local details can be successively allocated. Lack of the typical hierarchical global-to-local visual processing is longitudinally predictive of future reading difficulties in pre-readers, which suggests that an atypical local perception can interfere with reading skill acquisition. Global and local Navon tasks were used to induce a transient perceptual priming before a reading-aloud task. We tested the effect of an atypical local perception on lexical and sublexical reading routes in typical adult readers. Local (vs. global) priming resulted in a slower phonological access to irregular, relative to regular, words. By contrast, pseudoword reading was not affected by local (vs. global) perceptual priming. Our findings demonstrate that, in typical adult readers, local priming impairs the fast processing of the letter string useful for lexical reading.

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Funding

This work was funded with Grants from the CARIPARO Foundation (Borse di Dottorato CARIPARO 2015, to S.B.; Progetti di Eccellenza CARIPARO, 2011–2012 to A.F.),  a grant from MIUR (Dipartimenti di Eccellenza DM 11/05/2017 n. 262) to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua - CUP: C96C18000450005 to S.B, and a Grant from MIUR (Dipartimenti di Eccellenza DM 11/05/2017 n. 262) to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua. Progetto di ateneo anno 2013-CPDA130437 to SF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy

    Sandro Franceschini, Sara Bertoni, Giovanna Puccio, Martina Mancarella & Andrea Facoetti

  2. Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, 24129, Bergamo, Italy

    Simone Gori

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  1. Sandro Franceschini
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  2. Sara Bertoni
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  3. Giovanna Puccio
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  4. Martina Mancarella
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  6. Andrea Facoetti
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SF and AF designed the experiments, SF, SB, and AF performed the data analyses, SF, SG, SB wrote the paper. MM and GP performed the experiments.

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Correspondence to Sandro Franceschini.

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Franceschini, S., Bertoni, S., Puccio, G. et al. Local perception impairs the lexical reading route. Psychological Research 85, 1748–1756 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01326-z

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