PS

Understanding the cognitive processes underlying visual word recognition remains a major challenge in psycholin-guistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science. In fewer than 30 years, a large amount of work has identi-fied a number of relevant variables that affect the speed and accuracy with which words can be processed (for re-views, see Balota, Yap, & Cortese, 2006; Rastle, 2007). However, at the same time, it is becoming clear that the existing approach has its limitations. Nearly all research has been based on small studies involving a limited set of monosyllabic, monomorphemic words selected according to factorial designs with a limited number of independent variables matched on a series of control variables. The emphasis on monosyllabic words can easily be un-derstood by the facts that these words are relatively simple stimuli to work with, that researchers wanted to limit the number of words implemented in their computational models, and that, for these words, a lot of ratings about their lexical characteristics are available (such as subjec-tive frequency, age of acquisition, imageability, etc.; e.g.