Orthography, familiarity, and meaningfulness reconsidered: Attentional strategies may affect the lexical sensitivity of visual code formation.

Three same–different matching experiments used strings of letters as stimuli to explore the influence of orthography, familiarity, and lexical meaningfulness on visual code formation for words. In Experiment 1, larger effects of lexical meaningfulness occurred under conditions of visual stimulus degradation than when stimuli were bright and easy to resolve. Experiments 2 and 3 included diagnostics of two strategies (selective or divided attention) and showed that either could occur, but that only one produced the interaction. In the selective or visual, pattern of results which was observed in Experiment 2, lexicality interacted with the visual quality of the stimulus display, and there was no influence of phonological confusability between the strings being matched. In the divided attention, or multicode, pattern, observed in Experiment 3, lexicality and visual quality produced additive effects, while phonological confusability interfered with different decisions. This suggests that decisions were based on multiple, potentially redundant codes—visual and phonological—and that in such a situation the facilitatory influence of lexicality on visual code formation does not occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)