title: Contrasting five different theories of letter position coding: evidence from orthographic similarity effects.
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.
authors.affiliation: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia. colin.davis@bristol.ac.uk
authors.forename: Colin J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Davis
authors.forename: Jeffrey S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Bowers
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003463:Cues; D004739:England; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009517:New South Wales; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D013028:Space Perception