Arquivos Brasileiros de Psicologia
On-line version ISSN 1809-5267
Abstract
JUSTI, Francis Ricardo dos Reis; JUSTI, Cláudia Nascimento Guaraldo and ROAZZI, Antonio. Pseudowords' orthographic similarity effects on lexical access. Arq. bras. psicol. [online]. 2014, vol.66, n.3, pp.133-147. ISSN 1809-5267.
The present study investigated the effects that a stimulus’ orthographic similarity has in the participant’s reaction time and precision in a lexical decision task. The pseudowords in the lexical decision task corresponded to a factorial manipulation of two measures of orthographic similarity: N – the number of substitution neighbors (e.g., ‘hink’ and ‘hank’) and TLN – the number of transposed letter neighbors (e.g., ‘anlge’ and ‘angle’). A non-probabilistic sample of twenty graduated psychology students took part in this study. The experimental design consisted of a factorial manipulation of N and TLN in 2 x 2 within-subjects design. An interaction between N and TLN was observed, because TLN only inhibited the processing of pseudowords without substitution neighbors. It was argued that the TLN effect calls into question the representational schemas of nowadays skilled reading models.
Keywords : Reading; Orthographic neighborhood; Transposed letter neighbors; Lexical access.