Abstract
The present study compared the rates of detection of misspellings in content and in function words, controlling for the effects of familiarity by studying verbs that could be either content words or function words according to the context. In agreement with previous studies, it was found that errors were more readily detected in content words than in function words, thereby clearly demonstrating the importance of syntactic factors in processing the words in a text. Unlike previous studies, we did not find consistent evidence that errors changing the overall word shape were detected more easily than errors preserving word shape, and we found no evidence that the position of the error in the word affected its rate of detection. These findings were interpreted in the framework of an interactive approach to the reading process.
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Abramovici, S. Errors in proofreading: Evidence for syntactic control of letter processing?. Memory & Cognition 11, 258–261 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196972
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196972