ANAGRAM EFFECTS IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

Unpublished manuscript, 40 pages.Four experiments using a lexical decision task showed systematic effects of the anagram relationship between lexical units as well as between prime and target stimuli, even though the letter strings had no common letters in the same position. An "anagram frequency effect", similar to the well known "neighborhood frequency effect", was observed in Experiment 1. An anagram priming effect was observed in Experiment 4. An anagram prime x lexical anagram interaction effect was observed in Experiments 2 and 3. We concluded that the mental lexicon is activated by position-free letter codes, together with other units that separately encode the order information