THE EFFECTS OF SELECTED WORD PROPERTIES ON VISUAL RECOGNITION TIME: FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE, LENGTH, AND PRESENCE OF DIGRAPHS

The study aimed at evaluating the effect of various parameters of words on the speed of visual word recognition in Polish. Simple Lexical Decision task was used. Words were selected from classes of different frequency of occurrence (low, medium, high frequency), length (4,6,8 and 10-letter words) and presence of digraphs (present or not). A main effect of word frequency was obtained, however what is more interesting, there was a significant interaction of frequency and length effects, i.e., frequency mattered more for short than for longer words. There was also a significant interaction effect of frequency and the presence of digraphs: frequency mattered more for words with digraphs than for words without digraphs. The results are important for selecting verbal stimuli for various types of research that use visual word recognition. Controlling frequency seems to be most important for short words, controlling for length seems most important when dealing with frequent words. One of the possible mechanisms explaining the pattern found in data is the orthographic 'crowding' around short words which makes neighbors of less frequent short words inhibit their activation. Further research, preferably using correlational design, will be performed to test this hypothesis.