Word-to-letter inhibition: Word-inferiority and other interference effects

Four experiments were run to determine whether the interactive activation model would more accurately reflect the effect of context in letter perception by including word-to-letter inhibition resulting from word-to-word inhibition produced when multiple word units become active. The first three experiments found less accurate target letter discrimination in word than in nonword strings when a string was altered halfway through the exposure through adding or dropping a nontarget letter. The alteration changed a word to a different word or a nonword to a different nonword. Unaltered strings produced the typical word-superiority effect. The last experiment found an inverse relationship between target discrimination performance and the number of word substrings contained in each of a set of word quadrigrams that were individually exposed.