Abstract
Transposed-letter (TL) nonwords (e.g.,jugde) can be easily misperceived as words, a fact that is somewhat inconsistent with the letter-position-coding schemes employed by most current models of visual word recognition. To examine this issue further, we conducted four masked semantic/associative priming experiments, using a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the related primes could be words, TL-internal nonwords, or replacement-letter (RL) nonwords (e.g.,judge, jugde, orjudpe, respectively; the target would be COURT). Relative to an unrelated condition, masked TL-internal primes produced a significant semantic/associative priming effect, an effect that was only slightly smaller than the priming effect for word primes. No effect, however, was observed for RL-nonword primes. In Experiment 2, the TL-nonword primes were created by switching the two final letters of the primes (e.g.,judeg). The results again showed a semantic/associative priming effect for word primes, but not for TL-final nonword primes or for RL-nonword primes. Experiment 3 replicated the associative/semantic priming effect for TL-internal nonword primes, with, again, no effect for TL-final nonword primes. Finally, Experiment 4 again failed to yield a priming effect for TL-final nonword primes. The implications of these results for the choice of a letter-position-coding scheme in visual word recognition models are discussed.
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This research was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Grant A6333 to S.J.L. and by Grant BSO2002-03286 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology to M.P. Portions of the research described in this article were presented at the Masked Priming: State of the Art Conference, Sydney, Australia, April 2001.
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Perea, M., Lupker, S.J. Does jugde activate COURT? Transposed-letter similarity effects in masked associative priming. Memory & Cognition 31, 829–841 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196438
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196438