Abstract
Purcell, Stanovich, and Spector 119781 report that recognition of the center letter of the words APE, ARE, ACE, and AGE is superior to recognition of the same targets in the nonwords formed by the context letters V_H. Since a small set of predesignated targets was used and there was complete certainty about the location of the target letter, these results pose serious problems for three otherwise viable accounts for why word superiority effects (WSEs) are obtained in a variety of other paradigms. This series of experiments explores the possibility that the word advantages reported by Purcell et al. have nothing to do with the lexical properties of the A_E display or the general phenomenon of word superiority, but they result from a fortuitous case of differential lateral masking. This reinterpretation is supported by five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 show that the A_E word advantages are anomalous in that the magnitude of the WSE obtained with these particular words is not contingent upon the presence of a patterned mask. Experiment 3 provides direct evidence for differential lateral masking by showing that digit recognition is poorer in the V_H than in the A_E frame. Experiments 4 and 5 show that the WSE obtained under these conditions does not generalize to a new set of words and nonwords that produce the same amount of lateral masking. It was concluded that a genuine WSE does not occur under the conditions tested by Purcell et al., and that, therefore, the WSE has not been shown to depend on visual angle.
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Paap, K. R., Newsome, S. L., & Rudy, K.The locus of contextual and selective attention effects in letter recognition. Paper presented at the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Denver, April 1978.
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Earlier versions of this paper benefited from the comments of Dominic Massaro and the CIP group at NMSU, and the final product significantly reflects the concerns of an anonymous reviewer.
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Paap, K.R., Newsome, S.L. Do small visual angles produce a word superiority effect or differential lateral masking?. Memory & Cognition 8, 1–14 (1980). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197546
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197546