Abstract
Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors, neighbors-once-removed, and double-substitution neighbors. In Experiment 1, we used an illusory word paradigm and found that neighbor-once-removed similarity contexts resulted in fewer illusory word reports than substitution neighbors but more illusory words than double-substitution neighbors. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a masked form priming technique with a lexical-decision task. The pattern of facilitation was as predicted by spatial coding but was incompatible with slot-coding, Wickelcoding, and both versions of open-bigram coding. These results provide further support for the SOLAR (self-organizing lexical aquisition and recognition) model of visual word identification.
Translated title of the contribution | Contrasting five different theories of letter position coding: evidence from orthographic similarity effects |
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Original language | English |
Pages (from-to) | 535 - 557 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance |
Volume | 32 (3) |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2006 |