There is no clam with coats in the calm coast : Delimiting the transposed-letter priming effect

Abstract

In this article, we explore the transposed-letter priming effect (e.g., jugde–JUDGE vs. jupte–JUDGE), a phenomenon that taps into some key issues on how the brain encodes letter positions and has favoured the creation of new input coding schemes. However, almost all the empirical evidence from transposed-letter priming experiments comes from nonword primes (e.g., jugde–JUDGE). Indeed, previous evidence when using word–word pairs (e.g., causal–CASUAL) is not conclusive. Here, we conducted five masked priming lexical decision experiments that examined the relationship between pairs of real words that differed only in the transposition of two of their letters (e.g., CASUAL vs. CAUSAL). Results showed that, unlike transposed-letter nonwords, transposed-letter words do not seem to affect the identification time of their transposed-letter mates. Thus, prime lexicality is a key factor that modulates the magnitude of transposed-letter priming effects. These results are interpreted under the assumption of the existence of lateral inhibition processes occurring within the lexical level—which cancels out any orthographic facilitation due to the overlapping letters. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition.