The present study investigated the role of spelling in phonological variant processing. Participants learned the auditory forms of potential reduced variants of novel French words (e.g., /plur/) and their associations with pictures of novel objects over 4 days. After the fourth day of training, the spelling of each novel word was presented once.…

This experiment used the masked priming lexical decision task to address previous contradictory evidence about the relative strength of priming for (i) transparent pairs (e.g., "worker" "WORK") which are morphologically and semantically related; (ii) opaque pairs (e.g., "corner" "CORN") which appear to be morphological relatives but are not…

Two experiments investigated naming performance for items with and without digraphs. Both experiments compared performance for Regular Consistent, Regular Inconsistent and Exception words. Experiment 1 also compared nonwords with Non-Existent Bodies to those with existing Consistent and Inconsistent Bodies. Naming was slower for nonwords…

The process of naming an exception word prime (e.g., PINT) delays subsequent naming of a nonrhyming regular-inconsistent word body neighbor target (e.g., TINT). Both an activation account (Taraban & McClelland, 1987) and a learning account (Burt & Humphreys, 1993) have been offered to explain this interference effect. We investigated how long…

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…

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…