title: Transposed-letter priming effects for close versus distant transpositions.
abstract: Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (e.g., CHOLOCATE being processed as CHOCOLATE). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, we examined the effect of the number of intervening letters in transposed-letter effects with a masked priming procedure. In Experiment 1, letter transposition could involve adjacent letters (chocloate-CHOCOLATE) and nonadjacent letters with two intervening letters (choaolcte-CHOCOLATE). Results showed that the magnitude of the transposed-letter priming effect--relative to the appropriate control condition--was greater when the transposition involved adjacent letters than when it involved nonadjacent letters. In Experiment 2, we included a letter transposition condition using nonadjacent letters with one intervening letter (cholocate-CHOCOLATE). Results showed that the transposed-letter priming effect was of the same size for nonadjacent transpositions that involved one or two intervening letters. In addition, transposed-letter priming effects were smaller in the two nonadjacent conditions than in the adjacent condition. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Metodología, Facultad de Psicología, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain. mperea@valencia.edu
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
authors.forename: Jon Andoni
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Duñabeitia
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
mesh_terms: D004215:Distance Perception; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary