Author(s): García-Orza, Javier ; Comesaña, Montserrat ; Piñeiro, Ana ; Soares, Ana Paula ; Perea, Manuel
Date: 2016
Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/52954
Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
Subject(s): Ieet words; Quantity representations; Automatic processing; Lexical representations; Numerical Stroop task; leet words; Social Sciences; Ciências Sociais::Psicologia
Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as numbers (i.e., in terms of access to their quantity representation). To address this question, we conducted two experiments that examined the size congruity effect (i.e., when comparisons of the physical size of numbers are affected by their numerical magnitudes) in a physical-size judgment task. Participants were presented with pairs of leet words that were nominally identical except for the embedded digit (e.g., VIR7UAL-VIRTU4L) and were asked to decide as quickly and accurately as possible which word in the pair appeared in a bigger font. In Experiment 1, we examined the congruity effect (congruent: VIRTU4L-VIR7UAL vs. incongruent: VIR7UAL-VIRTU4L vs. neutral: VIR7UAL- VIR7UAL) and the numerical distance effect (distance 1: PAN3L-P4NEL vs. distance 3: VIRTU4L-VIR7UAL). To examine whether the meaning of these words was accessed, we also manipulated word frequency (i.e., a marker of lexical access) in Experiment 2. Results revealed effects of congruity, distance, and word frequency, thus suggesting automatic access to both number quantity and word representations for leet words. These findings favor multidimensional accounts of number/word recognition.
This work was supported by Grants PSI-2012-38423 and PSI2014-53444-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO). We thank Ismael Rodríguez-Montenegro for his help in collecting data. We also thank Joseph Tzelgov, Serje Robidoux, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
