Holistic processing of visual words (i.e., obligatory encoding of/attending to all letters of a word) could be a marker of expert word recognition. In the present study, we thus examined for the first time whether there is a direct relation between the word-composite effect (i.e., all parts of a visual word are fully processed when observers perform a task on a word part) and fast access to the orthographic lexicon by visual word experts (i.e., fluent adult readers). We adopted an individual differences approach and used the word-frequency effect (i.e., faster recognition of high- than low-frequency words) in an independent lexical decision task as a proxy of fast access to lexical orthographic representations. Fluent readers with larger word-composite effect showed smaller word-frequency effect. This correlation was mainly driven by an association between a larger composite effect and faster lexical decision on low-frequency words, probably because these lexical representations are less stable and integrated/unitized, hence allowing differentiating among fluent readers. We thus showed that holistic processing of visual words is indeed related to higher efficiency in visual word recognition by skilled readers.

中文翻译：

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整体单词处理与视觉单词识别的效率相关。

视觉单词的整体处理（即，对单词的所有字母进行强制编码/参加）可能是专业单词识别的标志。因此，在本研究中，我们首次检查了单词复合效应（即，当观察者对单词部分执行任务时，视觉单词的所有部分都得到充分处理）之间是否存在直接关系。视觉单词专家（即流利的成人读者）编写的正交词典。我们采用了个体差异方法，并使用了词频效应（即更快地识别高频单词而不是低频单词）作为独立访问词汇正字法表示的代理。流利的单词复合效应阅读器表现出较小的词频效应。这种相关性主要是由较大的复合效果和对低频词的更快词法决策之间的关联所驱动的，这可能是因为这些词法表示的稳定性和集成度/统一性较差，因此可以使流利的阅读者区别开来。因此，我们表明，视觉单词的整体处理确实与熟练的读者在视觉单词识别中的更高效率有关。