The role of outer/inner letters and eccentricity in word recognition: Evidence from two flanker lexical decision tasks

Abstract

This study explored the orthographic processing of flankers in two lexical decision task experiments. In the first experiment, we manipulated the location of the overlapped letters between targets and flankers with 5 experimental conditions: i) identity, ii) first three letters overlapped, iii) three internal letters overlapped, iv) three last letters overlapped, and v) unrelated. The results showed significant facilitatory effects for conditions i), ii) and iv), suggesting that only the letters adjacent to the targets are able to generate facilitation. In Experiment 2, we created 5 conditions to specifically control for the role of inner and outer letters. The experimental conditions were the following: i) identity, ii) first three letters of the targets are presented in an inner position, iii) last three letters of the targets are presented in an inner position, iv) three inner letters of the targets are presented in first position, and v) unrelated. The results showed faster responses for the ID condition with respect to all other experimental conditions, without other significant contrasts. These results suggest that both the location of the letter overlap and the role of outer/inner letters must be considered in explaining the results.