We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

Chinese inflection differs from that of European languages in that it is fully parsable in the orthography, which raises the possibility that Chinese inflected forms may not show the surface frequency effects found in other languages. Five lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine this issue. They showed that surface frequency did…

Applying Bloch's law to visual word recognition research, both exposure duration of the prime and its luminance determine the prime's overall energy, and consequently determine the size of the priming effect. Nevertheless, experimenters using fast-priming paradigms traditionally focus only on the SOA between prime and target to reflect the…

The present study investigated whether morphological encoding is involved in the production of Chinese disyllabic transparent compound words. The implicit priming task of Meyer (1990) was adopted. The first three experiments (Experiment 1A, 1B, and 2) determined that shared orthography or shared meaning alone did not produce the kind of…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…