Orthographic repetition blindness

Abstract

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to report the second occurrence of a repeated word, when words are sequentially and briefly displayed (Kanwisher, 1987). RB is also observed for non-identical words, such as home, dome. Explanations for non-identity RB assume that similarity at the level of the whole word causes the second word to be suppressed ("similarity inhibition"). Three experiments demonstrate that RB is robust for diverse types of orthographic relatedness, including critical words that share only their first initial letter, their last two letters, first three letters, middle three letters, beginning and final letters, three alternating letters, and three non-aligned letters (as in chance hand). The theoretical construct of similarity inhibition may be able to account for these data, although one mechanism previously proposed in the literature, neighbourhood inhibition, is probably not a useful way to explain the data on RB for words sharing only one or two letters. We introduce an alternative explanation for orthographic RB: Only the repeated letters are suppressed, and amount of RB depends on how easily the perceiver can reconstruct the target word from the non-suppressed letters.

Binding radicals in Chinese character recognition: Evidence from repetition blindness

“…Second, explicit radical-RB was observed more often in the repeated than unrepeated trials. That is, only the repeated radical was omitted while the residual radical was not (see Harris & Morris, 2000).…”

Attentional blink and repetition blindness

“…RB has been observed with a variety of stimuli, such as words,2 letters,11 and object pictures 10,55. RB has also been found with nonobject pictures that had no preexisting representations,9 and for words with similar orthography but different phonology,56 suggesting that visual/orthographic similarity can support RB. Cross‐case RB has been demonstrated using letters2,11 and RB has been observed for bilingual participants when the two targets were presented in different languages (e.g., caballos and horse),57 showing that semantic representations can underlie RB.…”

Repetition Blindness Occurs in Nonwords.

“…RB for chance hand occurs because of the han string within these words (Harris & Morris, 2000). Can a letter string within a word fail to be tokenized, or is tokenization strictly a lexical-level event?…”