Influence of case type, word frequency, and exposure duration on visual word recognition

The authors report 4 lexical decision experiments in which case type, word frequency, and exposure duration were varied. These data indicated that there is a larger mixed-case disadvantage for nonwords than for words for longer duration presentations of targets. However, when targets were presented for 100 ms (followed by a postdisplay pattern mask), a larger mixed-case disadvantage occurred for words than for nonwords. For word frequency, the data from Experiments 1, 2, and 3 revealed a slightly larger mixed- case disadvantage for higher frequency words than for lower frequency words. (There was additivity between word frequency and case type for experiment 4.) These results are consistent with a holistically biased, hybrid model of visual word recognition but inconsistent with analytically biased, hybrid models of word recognition, such as the process model (Besner & Johnston, 1989) and the interactive-activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981).