Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword…

Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., "R" in "propoint" or "filmure") or…

The study investigated parafoveal preprocessing by the means of the classical invisible boundary paradigm and a novel manipulation of the parafoveal previews (i.e., visual degradation). Eye movements were investigated on 5-letter target words with constraining (i.e., highly informative) initial letters or similarly constraining final letters.…

Three experiments are reported investigating the role of letter order in orthographic subset priming (e.g., "grdn"-GARDEN) using both the conventional masked priming technique as well as the sandwich priming technique in a lexical decision task. In all three experiments, subset primes produced priming with the effect being considerably…

In lexical decision, to date few studies in English have found a reliable pseudohomophone priming advantage with orthographically similar primes (the "klip-plip effect"; Frost, Ahissar, Gotesman, & Tayeb, 2003; see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006, for a review). On the basis of the Bayseian reader model of lexical decision (Norris,…

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing--as measured by masked priming--in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and…