The orthographic similarity of printed words
Colin J. Davis · Bristol Research (University of Bristol) · 2012
An inescapable feature of alphabetic languages, in which a relatively small alphabet is used to represent tens or hundreds of thousands of words, is that the spelling of a given word is often similar to that of many other words. This orthographic similarity requires the visual word identification system to make rather fine discriminations, so as to recognise, for example, that “the thickset man” is not the same as “the thickest man”. Ordinarily, the word identification system succeeds in selecting the word that best matches the visual input, implying that ...