Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recognizing written words involves identifying individual letters, as well as keeping track of specific positions of the letters. Interestingly, some languages show flexibility in letter- position encoding which is inferred by the observation that pseudowords formed by transposing internal letters of a word (e.g., jugde-JUDGE) can facilitate recognition of the given word. While research in English and other Indo-European languages have shown that readers can cope with such violations in the canonical order of letters in a word, research from other languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Korean show contrasting results. Such scenario creates a need of more research from different writing systems of the world, so that a universal model of word-recognition can be built. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated flexibility in letter-position encoding in Hindi (Devanagari script). Interestingly, we found evidence for flexibility in letter position encoding in Hindi similar to English and other Indo-European languages.