ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 29 / 40General DiscussionWe found, in Experiment 1, an "anagram frequency effect" equivalent to the wellknown "neighborhood frequency effect" (Grainger, O'Regan, Jacobs & Segui,1989, 1992; Grainger & Segui, 1990; Jacobs & Grainger, 1992), that is, aninfrequent word that has at least one frequent anagram was longer to recognizethan a word of the same frequency of use that has no lexical anagram. Thisindicates that the anagram relationship is a kind of orthographic similarity, andthus, the concept of position-free letter codes is relevant in the context of thehal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009word recognition. We found, in Experiment 2, an "anagram prime x lexicalanagram interaction effect" on infrequent target words, while frequent wordsappeared insensitive to the anagram priming. The structure of the observedinteraction was inconsistent with the Interactive-Activation hypothesis, while theActivation-Verification hypothesis provided a possible interpretative framework,and predicted an interaction with the SOA. This prediction was tested inExperiment 3, where the anagram prime x lexical anagram interaction observedin Experiment 2 was replicated and appeared independent of the SOA. Hencethe Activation-Verification hypothesis failed to explain the results. The structureof the anagram prime x lexical anagram interaction observed in Experiments 2and 3 was such that an infrequent word that had no lexical anagram wasstrongly inhibited by an anagram prime, while an infrequent word that had atleast one more frequent anagram in the lexicon was not inhibited by ananagram prime, and we even observed a non-significant facilitatory effect of theanagram prime at the longest SOAs. In Experiment 4, we used a procedure thatimplies full processing of the prime, and we observed that the prior presentationof a frequent anagram word significantly facilitated the subsequent recognitionof one of its less frequent lexical anagrams, while the prior presentation of aninfrequent anagram did not influenced the subsequent recognition of its more