How flexible is the orthographic processing of flankers? Effects for letter order and letter identification

Abstract

This study explored the flexibility of the orthographic processing at parafoveal level by manipulating the relationship between flankers and targets in two lexical decision tasks. In the first, we presented the following flankers: (1) the same words as targets (farola farola farola); (2) targets with transposed non-adjacent letters (falora farola falora); (3) the targets with one different letter (fapola farola fapola); and (4) unrelated pseudowords as control stimuli (pilata farola pilata). The results show significant facilitatory effects for all three experimental conditions in comparison to the Unrelated one, as well as differences between the Transposed and One Different Letter when compared to the Identity condition. In the second experiment, the procedure was the same but with the following modifications: the transposed non-adjacent letters were vowels instead of consonants (forala farola forala), and we also presented a condition in which both vowels and consonants were transposed (folara farola folara). The results of the response latencies showed that all the experimental conditions generated facilitatory effects in comparison to the Unrelated condition, with no differences between them, although the analyses of the error rates additionally showed significant differences between the Identity and the Transposed and Vowel and Consonant Transposed conditions. These two experiments are interpreted in terms of a highly flexible orthographic processing of flankers at parafoveal level, both in relation to letter ordering and letter identification.