One more trip to Barcetona: on the special status of visual similarity effects in city names

Abstract

AbstractPrevious research has shown that, unlike misspelled common words, misspelled brand names are sensitive to visual letter similarity effects (e.g., is often recognized as a legitimate brand name, but not ). This pattern poses problems for those models that assume that word identification is exclusively based on abstract codes. Here, we investigated the role of visual letter similarity using another type of word often presented in a more homogenous format than common words: city names. We found a visual letter similarity effect for misspelled city names (e.g., was often recognized as a word, but not ) for relatively short durations of the stimuli (200 ms; Experiment 2), but not when the stimuli were presented until response (Experiment 1). Notably, misspelled common words did not show a visual letter similarity effect for brief 200- and 150-ms durations (e.g., was not as often recognized as a word than ; Experiments 3–4). These findings provide further evidence that the consistency in the format of presentations may shape the representation of words in the mental lexicon, which may be more salient in scenarios where processing resources are limited (e.g., brief exposure presentations).