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The influences of verbal habits can be demonstrated just as convincingly for visual perception as for auditory perception. As early as 1885 James McKeen Cattell reported that speed of reading varies according to the familiarity of the language and that letters are easier to read when they form a word than when they stand in isolation. Cattell compared single letters with short words (1) by measuring the subject's reaction time and also (2) by determining the shortest exposure time that is necessary for correct recognition. At short exposure durations where only 4 or 5 random letters could be recognized it was possible to read as many as 3 short words that all together contained more than 4 or 5 letters. These results indicated that words are perceived as a whole and are as unitary in character as single letters. Somewhat later it was noted ( Dodge and Erdmann, 1898) that a word can be read at a distance at which its individual letters are unrecognizable.
Short exposures have been widely used for the study of visual perception. The instrument used to obtain brief exposures of variable duration is called a tachistoscope; the method is referred to as tachistoscopic presentation of the visual stimulus. The experimental problem is to determine the shortest duration at which the items can be correctly identified. This minimal duration necessary for accurate perception is called the duration threshold. In many respects this experiment is the visual counterpart of the auditory articulation test. From the large literature of the tachistoscopic experiments we can review here only a few of the more recent studies that reveal most clearly the influence of verbal habits.
If words can be perceived under conditions where scrambled letters cannot, it is natural to ask just how scrambled the letters must be. Is there some peculiar property about words, or can the difference be obtained with letter sequences that preserve the statistical structure of English but do not happen to form words? This question was explored by constructing pseudo words at different degrees of approximation to English and presenting them tachistoscopically. The pseudo words shown to the subjects each consisted of a sequence of 8 letters. These sequences were composed on the basis of zero-, first-, second-, and fourth-order approximations to the statistical structure of English. For the zero-order words, letters were selected at random from the alphabet. For the first-order words the letters were selected according to their relative frequency of occurrence in written English. For the second-order words the relative frequency of pairs of letters was observed, and for the fourthorder words the relative frequency of sequences of four letters was observed.