Reply to Strain, Patterson, and Seidenberg (2002).

Abstract

E. Strain, K. E. Patterson, and M. S. Seidenberg (2002) reported an effect of imageability and a RegularityImageability interaction in a regression analysis of naming latencies to 120 words. One of their items (couth) was named correctly by just 5 of their 24 participants, and its reaction time was an outlier on their distribution. When that single item is removed, the significant predictors are age of acquisition (AoA), word frequency, regularity, and length. Analyses of the combined data from J. Monaghan and A. W. Ellis's (2002) Experiments 1-3 indicate that AoA predicts naming latencies for exception words but not consistent words. E. Strain et al.'s other points are considered in the light of these observations. Monaghan and Ellis (2002) sought to test some predictions and clarify some assertions concerning the impact of spelling-sound consistency on word naming. Some of Monaghan and Ellis's observations were of relevance to a study by Strain, Patterson, and Seidenberg (1995), who suggested that consistency, or regularity (we shall regard the two as interchangeable for present purposes), interacts with imageability such that the reading of low-frequency exception words is affected by imageability more than is the reading of low-frequency regular words. By the end of their own investigations, Monaghan and Ellis were less sanguine. Monaghan and Ellis took a factorial approach to exploring interactions, ma- nipulating spelling-sound consistency plus one other factor in each experiment (word frequency in Experiment 1, age of acquisition (AoA) in Experiment 2, and imageability in Experiment 3). Con- sistency interacted with frequency and AoA, but no interaction between consistency and imageability comparable to that claimed by Strain et al. (1995) was found. Strain, Patterson, and Seidenberg (2002) disputed the effect of AoA and its interaction with consis- tency in Monaghan and Ellis's Experiment 2. In addition, they queried the reality of the consistency effect in Monaghan and Ellis's Experiment 3 and hence the relevance of that experiment to the issue of whether consistency interacts with imageability. Strain et al. (2002) reported a new experiment in which naming response times (RTs) to 120 words were analyzed using simulta- neous multiple regression. The predictor variables were imageabil- ity, AoA, word frequency, positional bigram frequency, ortho- graphic neighborhood size (Coltheart's N), letter length, spelling- sound regularity (coded as exception words � 0 and regular words � 1), and an interactive variable generated by multiplying each word's regularity by its (transformed) imageability value. Finally, there were 10 variables taken from Treiman, Mullenix, Bijeljac-Babic, and Richmond-Welty (1995) that represented prop- erties of the initial phonemes of the spoken words. Strain et al.