Processing of Alternated and Inverse Fonts in Word Recognition by Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

This study investigated the perceptibility of visually altered stimuli in word recognition by English- and Korean-speaking adults. Forty four college students from the U.S. and South Korea participated in this study. The orthographic depth hypothesis and the psycholinguistic grain size theory guided this study. Three different fonts (i.e., normal, alternated, and inverse fonts) and two lexical features (i.e., words and nonwords) were used in a lexical decision task. The results showed that native English speakers were less sensitive to the visually noisy shapes (i.e., alternated and inverse fonts) than the Korean participants. It suggests that the psycholinguistic unit of the first language plays a role in word recognition beyond the language dominance (i.e., first language vs. foreign language).