Salience of the word as a unit in the perception of language

摘要: Seven interlocking experiments are reported in which both guessing and recognition thresholds for words compared with those other linguistic units smaller than (nonword morphemes trigrams) larger (nominal compounds, ordinary noun phrases, nonsense compounds) the word. Thresholds were consistently lower or trigams (matched even much higher visual usage frequency) word-like nominal compounds (e.g.,stumbling block) phrases (copper (sympathy block). Prior exposure (through two correct recognitions) to constituent single of significantly facilitated subsequent single-word constituents, but prior had no effect whatsoever on their sin~e-word constituents. These results as a whole interpreted supporting following conclusions: (1)that word has special salience perception language; (2)that reason this is unique meaningfulness (or compound) whole; (3) that mechanism convergence feedback from central mediational processes feed-forward peripheral sensory upon integration word-form percepts.