Identical N-grams benefit more than reversed and switched N-grams in a flankertask: evidence from Spanish

Abstract

Results from the flanker lexical decision task have been inconsistent regarding the effect of the switched flankers. The aim of this study was to explore this effect in Spanish in two flanker lexical decision tasks. In Experiment 1, we presented 4 letter-long words as targets and 2 letterlong flankers with the following manipulation: (1) Intact (co cosa sa); (2) Switched (sa cosa co); (3) Reversed (oc cosa as); (4) Switched&Reversed (as cosa oc); and (5) Unrelated (le cosa pi). The results showed significant facilitative effects for the Intact condition compared to all other conditions, without significant differences between the Switched, the Reversed and the Switched&Reversed conditions. In Experiment 2 we carried out the same manipulation but with 6 letter-long words and 3 letters-long flankers. Latency analyses revealed a similar pattern of results as in the first experiment. Overall results are explained in the light of two different theoretical models.