Repetition blindness and effects of lexicality, orthographic similarity and homophony on report after rapid serial visual presentation

Report of both words from a sequence presented at rates of 8-10 per second is reduced if one of the words is a repetition of an earlier one. This is repetition blindness. A reduced deficit occurs even when the pair of words is orthographically or phonologically similar rather than identical. However, if the items are pronounceable nonwords or pseudohomophones rather than words, repetition improves rather than impairs recall. We report experiments in which the critical pairs of items were similar words, nonwords, homophones or pseudohomophones. The pattern of effects differs as a function of task variation and when the critical items are merely similar and not identical. We consider the implications for explanations of repetition blindness and discuss the relationships among phenomena termed repetition blindness, ‘orthographic repetition blindness’ and ‘phonological repetition blindness.’1 page(s