Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

Models of written word recognition in languages using the Roman alphabet assume that a word's visual form is quickly mapped onto abstract units. This proposal is consistent with the finding that masked priming effects are of similar magnitude from lowercase, uppercase, and alternating-case primes (e.g., beard-BEARD, BEARD-BEARD, and BeArD-BEARD).…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as…

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…

Masked affix priming effects have usually been obtained for words sharing the initial affix (e.g., "reaction"-"REFORM"). However, prior evidence on masked suffix priming effects (e.g., "baker"-"WALKER") is inconclusive. In the present series of masked priming lexical decision experiments, a target word was…