Neighborhood frequency does affect performance in the Reicher task: encoding or decision?

Eye movements when reading transposed text: the importance of word-beginning letters

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences with words containing transposed adjacent letters. Transpositions were either external (e.g., problme, rpoblem) or internal (e.g., porblem, probelm) and at either the beginning (e.g., rpoblem, porblem) or end (e.g., problme, probelm) of words. The results showed disruption for words with transposed letters compared to the normal baseline condition, and the greatest disruption was observed for word-initial transpositions. In Experiment 1, transpositions within low frequency words led to longer reading times than when letters were transposed within high frequency words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the position of word-initial letters is most critical even when parafoveal preview of words to the right of fixation is unavailable. The findings have important implications for the roles of different letter positions in word recognition and the effects of parafoveal preview on word recognition processes.

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency and masked repetition in the lexical decision task

In previous studies, additive effects of masked repetition and word frequency on lexical decision latency have been reported. This additive pattern was replicated in Experiment 1 with the use of low-frequency words (range, 1-7 per million) selected at random. In contrast, in Experiment 2, in which low-frequency words known to be familiar to the subjects were used, the masked repetition priming effect was greater for low-frequency than for high-frequency words. It is suggested that the absence of an interaction between masked repetition and frequency observed in previous studies and in the present Experiment 1 was due to the fact that very-low-frequency words often have an unstable representation in the subjects' lexicon and, consequently, sometimes fail to produce repetition priming effects in full.