title: Facilitative orthographic neighborhood effects: the SERIOL model account.
abstract: A large orthographic neighborhood (N) facilitates lexical decision for central and left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH) presentation, but not for right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH) presentation. Based on the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, this asymmetric N effect is explained by differential activation patterns at the orthographic level. This analysis implies that it should be possible to negate the LVF/RH N effect and create an RVF/LH N effect by manipulating contrast levels in specific ways. In Experiment 1, these predictions were confirmed. In Experiment 2, we eliminated the N effect for both LVF/RH and central presentation. These results indicate that the letter level is the primary locus of the N effect under lexical decision, and that the hemispheric specificity of the N effect does not reflect differential processing at the lexical level.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, USA. cwhitney@cs.umd.edu
authors.forename: Carol
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Whitney
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lavidor
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary