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Abstract
Informal observation suggests that it is harder to notice the spelling mistake in “silencne” than “silencre.” This concurs with current evidence that non-adjacent letter repetition in correctly spelled words makes these words harder to recognize. One possible explanation is provided by open-bigram coding. Words containing repeated letters are harder to recognize because they are represented by fewer bigrams than words without repeated letters. Building on this particular explanation for letter-repetition effects in words, we predicted that nonwords in a lexical decision task should also be sensitive to letter repetitions. In particular, we examined two types of nonwords generated from the same baseword: (1) nonwords created by repeating one of the letters in the baseword (e.g., silence => silencne); and (2) nonwords created by inserting a letter that is not present in the baseword (e.g., silencre). According to open-bigram coding, nonwords created by repeating a letter are more similar to their baseword than nonwords created by inserting a letter, and this should make it harder to reject letter repetition nonwords than letter insertion nonwords. We put these predictions to test in one on-line pilot study (n=31), one laboratory experiment (n=36), and one follow-up on-line experiment (n=40) where we manipulated the distance between repetitions (one, two, three, or four letters). Participants found it harder to reject repetition nonwords than insertion nonwords, and this effect diminished with increasing distance.
Highlights
Some readers might have already noticed that detecting the spelling mistake indicated by a red underline in MS Word is difficult when that mistake is caused by the repetition of a letter that is already in the word
We compared performance to two types of nonwords generated from the same baseword: (1) nonwords created by repeating one of the letters in the baseword; and (2) nonwords created by inserting a letter that is not present in the baseword
A power analysis with the R package SIMR (Green & MacLeod, 2016) performed on the data of an on-line pilot study testing the same stimuli as Experiment 1 (20 simulations) confirmed that the number of participants we recruited provided ample power for both response time (> 80% power reached with n=19) and error rate models (>80% power reached with n=9)
Summary
Some readers might have already noticed that detecting the spelling mistake indicated by a red underline in MS Word is difficult when that mistake is caused by the repetition of a letter that is already in the word (e.g., silencne, repetititon). The core mechanism of this model is the way that locationinvariant letter order is encoded – via an unordered set of ordered contiguous and non-contiguous letter pairs referred to as “open-bigrams” (e.g., word = od, wd, or, wo, wr, rd). According to this coding scheme, there is only one openbigram in the nonword “silencne” that is incompatible with the incorrectly written word “silence” – that is the bigram “cn.” On the other hand, if the typographical error is caused by the insertion of a letter that is not already present in the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331 Marseille, France.
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