Reports of superior memory for novel relative to familiar material have figured prominently in recent theories of memory. However, such "novelty effects" are incongruous with long-standing observations that familiar items are remembered better. In 2 experiments, we explored whether this discrepancy was explained by differences in the…

Performance in a lexical decision task is crucially dependent on the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination. More wordlike nonwords cause not only a latency increase for words but also, as reported by Stone and Van Orden (1993), larger word frequency effects. Several current models of lexical decision making can explain these types of…