Abstract
Subjects matched meaningful (e.g., FBI) or meaningless (e.g., IBF) letter strings. For “same” decisions meaningfulness was facilitatory, but this effect was slightly reversed for “different” decisions. Unfamiliar lowercase format abolished the meaningfulness effect. Even when stimulus degradation slowed performance, there was no interaction with meaningfulness.
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These data were gathered while the first author visited Reading University on a Canada Council leave fellowship. We thank Sharon Murphy for data collection and Max Coltheart for programming assistance. Completion of the study was supported by SSRC Grant 3301/1 to the first author.
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Henderson, L., Chard, J. On the nature of the facilitation of visual comparisons by lexical membership. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 7, 432–434 (1976). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337238
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337238