Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of orthographic neighbors that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider where neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate whether the influence of orthographic neighbors differs across letter positions. To do so, we quantify the number of enemies at each letter position (how many neighbors mismatch the target word at that position). Analyses of reaction time data from a visual word naming task indicate that the influence of enemies differs across letter positions, with the negative impacts of enemies being most pronounced at letter positions where readers have low prior uncertainty about which letters they will encounter (i.e., positions with low entropy). To understand the computational mechanisms that give rise to such positional entropy effects, we introduce a new computational model, VOISeR (Visual Orthographic Input Serial Reader), which receives orthographic inputs in parallel and produces an over‐time sequence of phonemes as output. VOISeR produces a similar pattern of results as in the human data, suggesting that positional entropy effects may emerge even when letters are not sampled serially. Finally, we demonstrate that these effects also emerge in human subjects' data from a lexical decision task, illustrating the generalizability of positional entropy effects across visual word recognition paradigms. Taken together, such work suggests that research into orthographic neighbor effects in visual word recognition should also consider differences between letter positions.

中文翻译：

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低熵地方的朋友：不同字母位置对视觉词识别的正交邻域效应不同

通过单个字母替换与目标单词不匹配的拼写邻居的存在促进了视觉单词识别。然而，研究人员通常不会考虑邻居与目标不匹配的地方。鉴于某些字母位置比其他字母位置提供更多信息的证据，我们调查了拼写邻居的影响是否因字母位置而异。为此，我们量化敌人的数量在每个字母位置（有多少邻居与该位置的目标词不匹配）。对视觉单词命名任务的反应时间数据的分析表明，敌人的影响因字母位置而异，敌人的负面影响在字母位置最明显，在这些位置，读者对他们将遇到哪些字母（即位置）的先验不确定性较低低熵）。为了理解产生这种位置熵效应的计算机制，我们引入了一个新的计算模型 VOISeR（视觉正交输入串行阅读器），它并行接收正交输入并产生一个随时间推移的音素序列作为输出。VOISeR 产生与人类数据类似的结果模式，表明即使字母没有连续采样，位置熵效应也可能出现。最后，我们证明了这些影响也出现在人类受试者的词汇决策任务数据中，说明了位置熵效应在视觉词识别范式中的普遍性。综上所述，此类工作表明，对视觉单词识别中的正字邻域效应的研究还应考虑字母位置之间的差异。