Decision times for word and letter search: A wholistic word identification model examined

Abstract

Three experiments were carried out employing a reaction time paradigm developed by Johnson. Letter comparison time was found to increase when other irrelevant letters were present regardless of whether or not the letters made up a word or a word-like configuration. In addition word comparison time was found to increase when distractors were similar to targets. These findings were compared with other reaction time studies of word and letter identification, which together suggested that a hypothesis that words are analysed as single patterns may not be necessary to account for Johnson's data.