On visual access to letter case and lexical/semantic information

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 13; no. 5; pp. 392 - 404
• Main Authors: Avant, Lloyd L., Thieman, Alice A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.09.1985
• Subjects: Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Discrimination Learning; Form Perception; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language; Letter Recognition and Discrimination; Masking; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Perceptual Masking; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Semantics; Visual Stimulation; Human; Vigilance; Visual imagery; Memory; Attention; Visual perception; Letter; Lexicons; Language; Mental automatism; Semantics; Vision; Masking
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03198452

Reported are 4 experiments designed to investigate automatic processing of letter case & lexical/semantic information under forward & backward masking conditions that disallowed a visible image. Stimulus displays were letter string pairs in which the letter case for each pair matched or did not match, & the relationship between the 2 strings within pairs varied. Experiment 1 (N = 40 undergraduates) required direct same-different responses to stimulus pairs. Experiments 2 & 3 (N = 80, 32) used a direct index of automatic prerecognition analyses of verbal-linguistic parameters & showed that, with 30-millisecond pre- & postmasked presentations, letter case, orthographic regularity, & lexical /semantic information are all analyzed in unconscious operations. Experiment 4 (N = 40) showed that, under viewing conditions used in experiments 2 & 3, Ss had no awareness of the stimulus input. Implications for models of unconscious processing are discussed. 7 Tables, 3 Figures, 50 References. Modified HA