The relative importance of the position of features in word identification has recently been investigated by Dr John Beech and colleagues Kate Mayall and Tessa Webb. In one experiment, they briefly presented either the outer part of a word or its inner part before presenting the whole word.

Outer Features	Inner Features

If people make greater use of the outer features of words then the prior presentation of the outer part of a word, before the whole word is displayed, should make it easier to identify the word. Dr Beech and colleagues found that the outer parts of words appeared to be processed earlier than the inner parts, even though the actual print area occupied by the outer word fragments was less (45 per cent vs 55 per cent).

However, further questions remain. For example, is this advantage for the outer part of a word because it helps us to see the overall word shape or because the most informative visual features happen to be on the outside, or is there a general propensity to process the outer edge (contour) of any figure? In a further experiment, the investigators managed to control for the ‘guessability’ of a word based on its visual features and still found a bias towards processing outer features.

Publications

• Webb TM, Beech JR, Mayall KA and Andrews AS. (2006). It's what's on the outside that matters: An advantage for external features in children's word recognition. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 94, 163-181.
• Beech JR and Mayall KA. (2005). The word shape hypothesis re-examined: evidence for an external feature advantage in visual word recognition. Journal of Research in Reading, 3, 302-319.