ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the reading problem and reviews the current work on letter and word perception. This research has been somewhat fragmented, with some investigators dealing exclusively with unstructured letter strings, others with the perception of isolated words, and still others with the effects of meaningful context on word perception. The Estes model is quite successful in predicting the experimental data of interest. Consider a detection task in which the nontarget items are highly confusable with the target. The model correctly predicts that performance will decrease as the number of items in this type of confusable array increases, because of the increased competition for feature extraction between the distractors and the target. Experimentation on the problem of how people perceive letters in words goes back to Cattell. Cattell was interested in determining how many individual letters could be reported from a briefly presented array.
