ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

P. Courrieu & M. Lequeux / Anagram Effects 32 / 40full inhibition from order information processing units (such as open-bigramnodes, phonological nodes, etc.). This could explain the anagram prime xlexical anagram interaction effect observed in Experiments 2 and 3. The factthat frequent words are not sensitive to anagram priming (Exp. 2) could simplymean that their activating input approximately counterbalances their inhibitoryinput, while infrequent words without a big brother are more sensitive toinhibitory information since, as a result of their low frequency of use, theiractivating connections are weakly weighted. Finally, when a big brother is fullyactivated, it provides a large amount of activation to its less frequent anagrams,hal-00429184, version 1 - 1 Nov 2009which explains the anagram priming effect observed in Experiment 4. As onecan see, the proposed framework allows for a coherent interpretation of theresults, which of course does not mean that this is necessarily the truth.However, it seems that a firm conclusion can be drawn concerning the role ofposition-free letter codes, since robust effects were observed that do not makesense without this hypothesis.ConclusionThe anagram relationship was shown to be a strong orthographic similarityfactor for human readers, and this similarity produced robust effects on wordrecognition performance, even though the anagrams did not have any of theircommon letters at the same position. This implies that position-free letter codesare used for accessing the mental lexicon, while the letter order information isalso taken into account, but in a separate way. These findings have theoreticalas well as methodological implications. In particular, it seems desirable to builda suitable orthographic similarity measure in order to reliably control theconfusability of experimental materials.