diff --git a/spacy/ml/models/tok2vec.py b/spacy/ml/models/tok2vec.py
index 888dc9caa..907a7a293 100644
--- a/spacy/ml/models/tok2vec.py
+++ b/spacy/ml/models/tok2vec.py
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ def MultiHashEmbed(
 @registry.architectures.register("spacy.CharacterEmbed.v1")
 def CharacterEmbed(
     width: int, rows: int, nM: int, nC: int, also_use_static_vectors: bool,
-    feature: Union[int, str]="NORM"
+    feature: Union[int, str]="LOWER"
 ):
     """Construct an embedded representation based on character embeddings, using
     a feed-forward network. A fixed number of UTF-8 byte characters are used for