Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy

Abstract

Numerous word recognition studies conducted over the past 2 decades are examined. These studies manipulated lexical familiarity by presenting words of high versus low printed frequency and most reported an interaction between printed frequency and one of several second variables, namely, orthographic regularity, semantic concreteness, or polysemy. However, the direction of these interactions was inconsistent from study to study. Six new experiments clarify these discordant results. The first two demonstrate that words of the same low printed frequency are not always equally familiar to subjects. Instead, subjects' ratings of "experimental familiarity" suggest that many of the low-printed-frequency words used in prior studies varied along this dimension. Four lexical decision experiments reexamine the prior findings by orthogonally manipulating lexical familiarity, as assessed by experiential familiarity ratings, with bigram frequency, semantic concreteness, and number of meanings. The results suggest that of these variables, only experiential familiarity reliably affects word recognition latencies. This in turn suggests that previous inconsistent findings are due to confounding experiential familiarity with a second variable.

Figure 1

Mean reaction time from Rice and Robinson’s (1975) study and mean lexical confidence ratings from Experiment 1 for word stimuli.

Figure 2

Mean reaction time to words presented in Experiment 5 as a function of familiarity and pronounceability of nonwords.