Enemies and friends in the neighborhood: orthographic similarity effects in semantic categorization.
Studies investigating orthographic similarity effects in semantic tasks have produced inconsistent results. The authors investigated orthographic similarity effects in animacy decision and in contrast with previous studies, they took semantic congruency into account. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance to a target (cat) was better if a previously studied neighbor (rat) was congruent (i.e., belonged to the same animate-inanimate category) than it was if it was incongruent (e.g., mat). In Experiments 3 and 4, performance was better for targets with more preexisting congruent neighbors than for targets with more preexisting incongruent neighbors. These results demonstrate that orthographic similarity effects in semantic categorization are conditional on semantic congruency. This strongly suggests that semantic information becomes available before orthographic processing has been completed.
Pecher
Diane
D
Department of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands. pecher@fsw.eur.nl
Zeelenberg
René
R
Wagenmakers
Eric-Jan
EJ
D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary