Whammies and double whammies: The effect of length on nonword reading

The work presented here investigated the length effect in nonword reading aloud in order to assess whether that effect is driven by the number of letters in a string or by the number of graphemes in a string. Simulation work with the DualRoute Cascaded (DRC) model (e.g., Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993; Coltheart & Rastle, 1994) uncovered a surprising finding regarding the length effect; the same result was obtained in an experiment with human subjects. Results are discussed in terms of the DRC model, with particular reference to serial processing and interphoneme inhibition, two properties critical to understanding the effect reported here. Whammies and double whammies 3 Whammies and double whammies: The effect of length on nonword reading It is well known that naming latencies for words and nonwords are affected by string length: naming latency increases as string length increases (Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976; Weekes, 1997; for review see Henderson, 1982). For words, this l..