Visual Word Recognition in Adults

The act of seeing a word and instantly and without conscious effort recognizing its pronunciation is known as word recognition. When reading words necessitates deliberate, effortful decoding, there is little attention available for text comprehension. Because reading comprehension is the ultimate aim in teaching children to read, ensuring that they can read words with meaning is a key early goal. Reading relies heavily on visual word identification. Although readers appear to have little trouble recognizing visually displayed words, the mechanisms that transfer orthography to phonology and semantics are far from simple. There are limited informative data available in typical population and across gender. As a result, the current research compares the durational characteristics of sense and non-sense words in male and female participants. The aim of the study was to compare the durational aspects in visual word recognition in male and female. 30 Adults in the age range of 18-24 years further divided into 15 male and 15 female and all participants were native of Kerala and fluent in reading and writing in Malayalam. The finalized wordlists were presented through a computer to each individual. The data was recorded from each individual in a quit well illuminated and noise free room with a computer display kept at a distance of 1feet from the individual. Individual responses were measured from the onset to the termination of word utterance. The obtained values were subjected to statistical analysis and found that female have more word duration than male, but when it compared sense and non-sense words, high significant (p=0.00) was noted. The obtained data is useful for speech and language pathologists in the management of dementia, aphasia and other language disorders were naming of the object is affected. Also the results can be helpful for the audiologists in speech recognition tests.