THE INDEPENDENCE OF LETTER AND WORD-PROCESSING IN LETTER-BY-LETTER READING

Recognition of words and of component letters of stimuli were examined in a letter-by-letter reader. Frequency and neighborhood density effe cts are present in word recognition but not in letter identification. There was no difference between single-letter reading times for words and nonwords, and there was no correlation between reading times for w ords and for individual letters off the same stimuli. LBL reading does not exclusively rely on sequential letter identification. Rather, LBL patients also have access to a whole-word procedure.