Direct Comparison of Masking and Half-Letter Word-Superiority Effects

Abstract

Subjects identified a position-cued critical letter in a linear array of four letters. Each critical letter formed part of either a word or an unpronounceable nonword, and the method used to present the stimuli was varied orthogonally with these conditions. That is, each letter array was followed either by a pattern mask or was presented as two temporally separated halfletter arrays of complementary letter parts. A different group of subjects was assigned to each of these four array by presentation conditions. The delay between the onset of the array and the onset of the mask, and between the onsets of leading and trailing half-letter arrays was varied as 40, 60, 80, 100, and 120 ms. Advantages for the words were observed under both conditions of presentation, but the magnitude of the word advantage was reliable and much greater in the masking conditions. This finding supports the major role given to pattern masking in the formulation of the interactive activation model of word perception and the word-superiority effect.