Length effects in word perception: comment on Samuel, van Santen, and Johnston

It is argued that the apparent length effect found by Samuel, van Santen, and Johnson (1982) may be the result of a lexical class effect rather than of the length of the words. It is pointed out that the words of Length 2 in the stimulus sets used by Samuel et al. are predominantly closed class items (i.e., function words), whereas those of Length 3 and 4 are predominantly open class items (i.e., content words). It is hypothesized that recognition accuracy for open class words may be greater than for closed class words and that the apparent length effect may be confounded with the lexical class effect.