Abstract
Letters in briefly presented masked letter strings were detected more accurately when the strings were three-consonant acronyms than when they were nonwords. In the absence of orthographic regularity, this word superiority effect (WSE) could not have depended on visual units corresponding to familiar bigrams. Since rendering the acronyms visually unfamiliar by alternating the case of their constituent letters did not introduce the left-right scanning effects observed for nonwords, it is concluded that the processing of the acronyms did not depend on the formation of whole-word visual units. It is argued instead that the WSE resulted from the postlexical activation of associatively connected single-letter codes. Finally, the results of case-alternation, sizealternation, and mixed-type-font experiments are interpreted in conjunction with the view that lexical access is based on both lowercase and uppercase letter recognition units for words and only uppercase letter recognition units for acronyms.
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The research reported in this paper was supported by Grant MDA903-82-C-0317 from the Army Research Institute.
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Noice, H., Hock, H.S. A word superiority effect with nonorthographic acronyms: Testing for unitized visual codes. Perception & Psychophysics 42, 485–490 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209756
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209756