Orthography and familiarity effects in word processing.

Abstract

Both orthographic regularity and visual familiarity have been implicated as contributors to the efficiency of processing visually presented words. Sets of letter strings in which orthography and familiarity were factorially combined were used as the basis for physical, phonetic, semantic, and lexical judgments in 4 experiments with a total of 64 paid Ss. The data indicated consistent effects of orthography on the activation of all codes. Familiarity had a clear influence on the activation of semantic codes and to a lesser extent affected phonetic codes. Results show that speeded decisions based on visual codes are most strongly influenced by rule-governed processing mechanisms sensitive to orthographic structure, whereas decisions based on phonetic and semantic codes are affected about equally by rule-governed mechanisms and by stimulus-specific mechanisms sensitive to familiarity. (59 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)