ANTOINETTE WAS THE QUEEN OF.pdf

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a prelexical phonological level? Manuel Perea Universitat de Vale?ncia, Vale?ncia, Spain Manuel Carreiras Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain Nonwords created by transposing two letters (e.g., RELOVUTION) are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (Perea Lupker, 2004). In the present study, we examined whether the nature of transposed-letter (TL) similarity effects was purely orthographic or whether it could also have a phonological component. Specifically, we examined transposed-letter similarity effects for nonwords created by transposing two nonadjacent letters (e.g., relovucio?n– REVOLUCIO?N) in a masked form priming experiment using the lexical decision task (Experiment 1). The controls were (a) a pseudohomophone of the transposed-letter prime (relobucio?n– REVOLUCIO?N; note that B and V are pronounced as /b/ in Spanish) or (b) an orthographic control (reloducio?n–REVOLUCIO?N). Results showed a similar advantage of the TL nonword condition over the phonological and the orthographic control conditions. Experiment 2 showed a masked phonological priming effect when the letter positions in the prime were in the right order. In a third experiment, using a single-presentation lexical decision task, TL nonwords produced longer latencies than the orthographic and phonological controls, whereas there was only a small phonological effect restricted to the error data. These results suggest that TL similarity effects are orthographic—rather than phonological—in nature. When we read the sentence “MARIE ANTOINETTE WAS THE QUEEN OF FRANCE WHEN THE FRENCH RELOVUTION STARTED”, we may not notice that the word REVOLUTION was misspelled—two letters were exchanged. Interestingly, replacing one or two letters of the same word (e.g., REVOMUTION or RESOMUTION) makes the misspelling much more noticeable (see Grainger Whitney, 2004; Perea Lupker, 2004). In other words, nonwords