Three experiments are described which use RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) to demonstrate a new cognitive phenomenon called “repetition blindness”. Subjects have difficulty detecting repeated words-even when the two occurrences are nonconsecutive and differ in case (Experiment 1). In immediate verbatim recall of sentences (Experiment 2), subjects selectively omitted second instances of repeated words, sacrificing the meaning and grammaticality of the sentence. In Experiment 3, recognition threshold for the last word in a list was lowered, not elevated, when that word had also occurred earlier in the same list. Thus, repetition blindness does not result from a refractory period for recognition of second occurrences. These findings support a distinction between the perceptual processes of (i) recognizing a word as’being of a certain type, and (ii) individuating a word as a particular token of that type: repetition blindness occurs when words are recognized as types but not individuated as tokens.

similarity effects in masked associative priming One issue that all models of visual word recognition in alphabetic orthographies must ultimately take a position on is how the human processing system encodes letter positions when creating internal orthographic representations. Furthermore, although the choice of a coding scheme might seem to be a secondary aspect of these models, it can have a large impact on a model’s predictions (Andrews, 1996). For example, virtually all of the current models assume that the derived orthographic representation activates the lexical representations of formally similar words

d together in a specific order, because different words can be written with the same letters. The present research had two aims: first, to clarify the cerebral stages of processing that lead to invariant word recognition, and second, to examine whether those stages can proceed in the absence of consciousness. In literate adults, an extended strip of the left fusiform gyrus activates whenever visual words are presented (Cohen et al., 2000; Cohen et al., 2002; Nobre, Allison, & McCarthy, 1994). This region, which has been termed the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), is responsive only to written words, not to spoken words (Dehaene, Le Clec'H, Poline, Le Bihan, & Cohen, 2002). Its lesioning results in a severe word identification impairment, pure alexia, which is restricted to the visual modality (Leff et al., 2001). Thus, it is a plausible candidate for the neural basis of invariant visual word recognition. To further specify the nature of word coding in the VWFA, we used the priming metho

In reading, lexical form-form relations may be more reliable than form-meaning relations. Accordingly, phonological forms (activated by graphic forms) become actual constituents, rather than addenda, of word identification. These considerations suggest that access to phonological forms can precede meaning access in single-word reading in many circumstances. The time course of form and meaning activation during Chinese word reading was tested in 2 primed-naming experiments varying prime type and prime-target stimulus onset asynehrony (SOA). The results showed a sequence of facilitation over SOA: (a) graphic, (b) phonological, (e) semantic. Words with precise meanings produced more rapid semantic priming than words with vague meanings. Graphic prime facilitation at a 43-ms SOA gave way to inhibition at longer SOAs. The onset of graphic inhibition coincided with the onset of phonological facilitation, suggesting a single identification moment. The authors describe an interactive constituency model that accounts for the pattern of data. Writing systems vary in how they represent the phonology of the language they encode. How are these differences reflected in visual word identification? Three classes of hypotheses have been proposed. According to the universal direct access hypothesis, word reading is accomplished by a visual route in all writing systems and in all orthographies. Phonological processing, to the extent that it occurs, is a product of individual reader and word characteristics (e.g., word frequency; Baluch & Besner, 1991; Besner, 1987;

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Four lexical decision experiments were conducted to analyze whether the previous presentation of a syllabic "neighbor" (e.g., boca and bono; which share the first syllable in Spanish) influences recognition performance using a masked priming paradigm. The results showed an inhibitory effect of more frequent syllabic primes (boca-BONO; Experiment 1) and some facilitation of nonword syllabic primes (bofa-BONO; Experiments 2-3). Further, when monosyllabic pairs were used (ziel-ZINC; Experiment 3), no priming effects of the two first letters were found. Finally, by using only syllables as primes (ca**** vs. cas***), latencies to CV and CVC words were faster when preceded by primes that corresponded to the first syllable than by primes that contained one letter more or less than the first syllable (Experiment 4). The results are interpreted in the context of activation models that take into account a syllabic level of representation.

Some theories of visual word recognition postulate that there is a level of processing or representation at which morphemes are treated differently from whole words. Support for these theories has been derived from priming experiments in which the recognition of a target word is facilitated by the prior presentation of a morphologicallyrelatedprime (departure-DEPART). In English, such facilitation could be due to morphological relatedness, or to some combination of the orthographic and semantic relatedness characteristic of derivationally related words. We report two sets of visual priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions (43 ms, 72 ms, and 230 ms). Results showed that morphological structure plays a signi�cant role in the early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic relatedness. Findings are discussed in terms of current approaches to morphological processing. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Kathleen Rastle, Department of Experimental

The relationships between repetition/form priming effects and neighborhood density were analyzed in two masked priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Given that form priming effects appear to be influenced by a word's orthographic neighborhood, it is theoretically important to find out whether or not repetition priming also differs as a function of the words orthographic neighborhood. Within an activation framework, repetition and form priming effects are just quantitatively different phenomena, whereas the two effects are qualitatively different in a serial-ordered model of lexical access (the entry-opening model). The results show that repetition and form priming effects were stronger for hermit words than for words with many neighbors. These results pose some problems for both activation and serial-ordered models. The implications of these results for determining how neighbors affect the identification of a word are discussed.

Response time (RT) distributions obtained from 3 word recognition experiments were analyzed by fitting an ex-Gaussian function to the empirical data to determine the main effects and interactive influences of word frequency, repetition, and lexicality on the nature of the underlying distributions. The ex-Gaussian analysis allows one to determine if a manipulation simply shifts the response time (RT) distribution, produces a skewing of the RT distribution, or both. In contrast to naming performance, the lexical decision results indicated that the main effects and interactions of word frequency, repetition, and lexicality primarily reflect increased skewing of the RT distributions, as opposed to simple shifts of the RT distributions. The implications of the results were interpreted within a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance. One of the most robust, and probably least surprising, empirical observations in the word recognition literature is that the frequency of exposure to a word modulates the ease with which that word is processed in the future. This phenomenon is reflected in both the word-frequency effect in which extant word-frequency counts (e.g., Kucera & Francis, 1967, norms) predict lexical decision and naming

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