The Effect of Orthographic Structure and Lexical Meaning on “Same-different” Judgments

Abstract

Pairs of high frequency English words, orthographically acceptable pseudo-words, and non-word letter strings were presented in a “same”-“different” task. The mean reaction times for “same” judgments were ordered; real words were faster than pseudo-words, and pseudo-words were faster than non-words. The RTs for the “different”, judgments showed no differences among the three types of words, except in the first two days of practice in a blocked presentation condition when the difference between the real words and non-words was marginally significant. These and other results suggest that “same” judgments are based upon a comparison process which efficiently uses higher order semantic and orthographic information in words, whereas “different” judgments are based upon comparison process which performs a self-terminating search of the graphemic information in words. The results were also discussed with reference to hierarchical models of word perception and reading.

Evidence for lexical access in a simultaneous matching task

“…The eff~ct of an increase in length tended to be greatest for illegal was significant across both subject and item means, may have been observed because two very distinct frequency groups were compared, viz, common and rare words. The second finding, that words are matched faster than legal nonwords, confirms the findings recently reported by Barron and Pittenger (1974), and the fact that the results in the present experiment permitted simultaneous generalization to the population of items and subjects show that the previous fmding was not due to accidental sampling errors.…”

“…On the other hand, Barron and Pittenger's (1974) and Krueger's (1970a) results support the idea that words are processed faster than legal nonwords because of word familiarity.…”

“…Increasing the familiarity of nonwords by presenting them repeatedly must ultimately give these items some kind of representation in the lexicon, and hence will diminish the possibility of observing a word-legal nonword difference. Such a trend is apparent in the results for "same" items in the Barron and Pittenger (1974) study, where the superiority of word items over legal nonwords tends to diminish in later test sessions. Since the present study is concerned mainly with the role of lexical information in the identification of letter strings, none of the items were repeated.…”

“…As Clark (1973) points out, most analyses fail to establish generality over both items and subjects simultaneously, since items are usually treated as a fixed, rather than a random, effect. The three studies most closely related to the present experiment (Baron & Thurston, 1973;Barron & Pittenger, 1974;Eichelman, 1970) are all deficient in this respect, and it could be argued that the conclusions drawn by these investigators are valid only for the particular samples of items used in each study. In fact, as Clark points out, when a small fixed sample of items is used for each subject, it is highly probable that different results will be found with different samples of items.…”

“…If the tasks used in the Baron and Thurston (1973), Barron and Pittenger (1974), and Krueger (1970b) studies all require the subject to encode the stimuli at a linguistic level of representation, then one would expect this similarity to be reflected in the results of all tasks.…”