Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331, Marseille, France.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Apr;28(2):596-609. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01837-1. Epub 2020 Nov 24.
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.
非形式观察表明，“silencne”中的拼写错误比“silencre”中的拼写错误更难注意到。这与当前的证据一致，即在正确拼写的单词中，非相邻字母重复会使这些单词更难识别。开放双字母编码提供了一种可能的解释。包含重复字母的单词更难识别，因为它们的双字母表示比没有重复字母的单词少。基于这种对单词中字母重复效应的特殊解释，我们预测词汇判断任务中的非单词也应该对字母重复敏感。具体来说，我们检查了两种类型的从同一个基础词生成的非单词：（1）通过重复基础词中的一个字母生成的非单词（例如，silence => silencne）；（2）通过插入基础词中不存在的字母生成的非单词（例如，silencre）。根据开放双字母编码，通过重复一个字母生成的非单词比通过插入一个字母生成的非单词更类似于其基础词，这应该使得更难以拒绝重复字母的非单词而不是插入字母的非单词。我们通过一个在线初步研究（n=31）、一个实验室实验（n=36）和一个后续在线实验（n=40）来检验这些预测，在这些实验中，我们操纵了重复字母之间的距离（一个、两个、三个或四个字母）。参与者发现，拒绝重复非单词比拒绝插入非单词更难，而且这种效应随着距离的增加而减弱。
