ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 17 / 40The general characteristics of the experimental device were identical to those inExperiment 1. An experimental trial began with the display of a fixation point inthe center of the screen. Then a tone rang, and 500 ms later, a string of 5letters was displayed with the third letter placed at the fixation point. Thisstimulus (prime) remained on the screen for 200 ms, and was then masked by astring of 5 asterisks (which also remained on the screen for 200 ms) designedto prevent direct visual "correlations" across stimuli. Finally, the asterisks werereplaced by a 5-letter stimulus that was either a word or a regular pseudo-word(target), and remained on the screen until the participant made a lexicalhal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009decision (on the latter stimulus only) by pressing the yes or no key. Theparticipant's responses and response times (in ms) were recorded. The teststimulus was erased as soon as the response was given, and the next trialbegan 3 seconds later. The testing began with 24 practice trials in a constant,random order. These were followed by 96 trials in a random order which variedrandomly across participants.MaterialThree sets of sixteen, 5-letter test words (lowercase letters, with diacriticalmarks) were selected to be used as the second stimulus (target). Each setcontained 8 frequent words and 8 infrequent words (see the log-frequencies inTable 5). Each word in sets 1 and 2 had between 1 and 3 anagrams (other thanitself) in the French lexicon, and the two sets were balanced for the number ofanagrams. The words in set 3 had no lexical anagrams. To each test word, oneassociated an anagram such that the common letters of the two strings neverwere at the same position. For the set 1, the associated anagram was always aFrench word, while for sets 2 and 3 its was always a non-word. Each group of 8words in each set was divided into two sub-groups of four words. In one of two