Word Frequency Effects for LEET Lettering in Word Recognition

Letter substitution has been shown to have a cost to word recognition performance, such as increased reaction time. The use of orthographically similar numbers or symbols as a substitute for letters is known as LEET. Perea, Duñabeitia, and Carreiras (2008) showed that word recognition was not affected when LEET substitutions were used as primes. This study examined whether the effects of LEET prime substitutions would remain constant across word frequency. The apparent lack of substitution costs may have been an effect of word-level processing such as holistic bias for high-frequency words. Evidence that LEET does not have an appreciable cost to performance across word frequency suggests that such orthographic substitutions are processed much like normally lettered words, which supported Perea et al.'s findings. It was suggested that LEET substitutions offset substitution costs because of orthography (because of more complete processing of nonsubstituted letters) rather than lexical effects (i.e., holistic bias).