Influencia de la frecuencia de las letras en el efecto de facilitación por transposición de letras

A masked priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to examine the influence of letter frequency in the transposed-letter similarity effect. The experiment was run in Spanish, and for the purposes of the study and the experimental manipulation, the consonants with highest and lowest frequency of appearance were involved in the transpositions. The nonword primes were created by transposing nonadjacent letters with similar frequencies. In all the cases it was controlled that the letters involved in the transposition were both high frequency letters or low frequency letters. A parallel procedure was followed with the control nonword primes, which were created by replacing the critical letters by other consonants with approximately the same letter shape and frequency. Results showed the expected facilitation for the transposed primes (when compared with the control primes), but only for the low frequency letter condition. When the involved letters were high-frequency letters, the facilitation effect was not reliable. Therefore, letter-frequency seems to modulate the facilitation-by-transposition effect. The implications that these results have for the models in visual word recognition are examined and discussed.