Making letters distinctive

Results of a study with 77 kindergartners, 24 1st graders, 21 2nd graders, and 6 college students show that small graphic changes made in normal letters of the alphabet changed the similarity relations among those letters. All Ss classified letters of this distinctive font faster and with fewer errors than they classified normal letters. It is shown that it is not features alone but relations between features within letters, and relations between letters in the stimulus set, that determine how difficult any particular letter is to classify. The advantage of the distinctive font is such that many children had less difficulty classifying distinctive letters into bins labeled with normal letters than doing the conceptually easier match-to-sample task of placing normal letters into bins labeled with normal letters. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1980 American Psychological Association.

Duke Scholars

Author Gregory R. Lockhead Psychology & Neuroscience