ArticlePsychological research2022
The impact of capitalized German words on lexical access.
Article in Psychological research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are letter identity and letter order encoding functionally separable? Evidence from masked priming with visual similarity and letter transpositions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- A Matter of Font: Visual Word Form Area Responses to Brand Names Are More Sensitive to Font Than to Letter Case Changes.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The CASE of brand names during sentence reading.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Visual word identification beyond common words: The role of font and letter case in brand names.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Dissociating the Effects of Visual Similarity for Brand Names and Common Words.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Letters, Words, Sentences, and Reading.Journal of cognition · 2024Review
- Misspelled logotypes: the hidden threat to brand identity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Are brand names special words? Letter visual-similarity affects the identification of brand names, but not common words.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Leading models of visual word recognition assume that the process of word identification is driven by abstract, case-invariant units (e.g., table and TABLE activate the same abstract representation). But do these models need to be modified to meet nuances of orthography as in German, where the first letter of common nouns is capitalized (e.g., Buch [book] and Hund [dog], but blau [blue])? To examine the role of initial capitalization of German words in lexical access, we chose a semantic categorization task ("is the word an animal name?"). In Experiment 1, we compared German words in all-lowercase vs. initial capitalization (hund, buch, blau vs. Hund, Buch, Blau). Results showed faster responses for animal nouns with initial capitalization (Hund < hund) and faster responses for lowercase non-nouns (blau < Blau). Surprisingly, we found faster responses for lowercase non-animal nouns (buch < Buch). As the latter difference could derive from task demands (i.e., buch does not follow German orthographic rules and requires a "no" response), we replaced the all-lowercase format with an orthographically legal all-uppercase format in Experiment 2. Results showed an advantage for all nouns with initial capitalization (Hund < HUND and Buch < BUCH). These findings clearly show that initial capitalization in German words constitutes an essential part of the words' representations and is used during lexical access. Thus, models of visual word recognition, primarily focused on English orthography, should be expanded to the idiosyncrasies of other Latin-based orthographies.
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