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Date of Award

Spring 2012

Document Type

Restricted Thesis: Campus only access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Cindy Bukach

Abstract

Starting at birth people are exposed to faces and during formal education they are exposed to" "written words. This exposure to faces and learned literacy can be thought of as expertise. Face" "experts use holistic processing to recognize faces, looking at the faces as a whole rather than as" "specific parts (Farrah and Wilson, 1998). The current study examined whether we also use" "holistic processing when reading words and whether simultaneous or sequential presentation of" "stimuli effects holistic processing. A recent study done on word expertise by Hsiao and Cottrell" "(2009) using Chinese characters to test novice and expert processing of Chinese words showed" "that novices rather than experts processed words holistically. This study manipulated attention" "to tops and bottoms of words and presented the words simultaneously. A study done by Wong," "Bukach, Yuen, Yeung and Greenspon, (2011) suggests that sequential presentation of words is" "more sensitive to holistic processing for both Roman characters (Wong, Bukach, Yuen, Yeung" "and Greenspon, 2011) and Chinese characters (Wong, Bukach, Yuen, Yang, Leung &" "Greenspon, in prep). Wong et al. (in prep) showed holistic processing of Chinese characters for" "both expert and novices, but only experts showed more holistic processing of words than" "nonwords. The goal of the current experiment is to further investigate expert processing of" "Chinese characters by examining the impact of sequential versus simultaneous presentation on" "holistic processing."

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