When words containing an orthographically similar segment (rock, shock) are rapidly displayed in word lists and immediately reported by subjects, the second critical word (W2) is frequently omitted, a deficit known as repetition blindness (Kanwisher, 1987). Three experiments used an illusory words paradigm to demonstrate a sublexical locus for repetition blindness in orthographically overlapping words. In Experiment 1, we constructed RSVP streams of words and word fragments which would allow the W2's unique letter clusters to combine with a word fragment to create a word, as in rock shock ell. The illusory word shell was produced 36% of the time in the RB condition, compared to 16 % of the time for letter migration control trials (rock shoeu ell) and 16% of trials containing sequential presentation of the illusory word's fragments (rock sh ell). Experiment 2 demonstrated the same superiority for the RB condition over a letter migration control using nonword stimuli (riwu shiwu ell). Experiment 3 showed that the unique letters left-over after RB are marked for position. Implications for models of repetition blindness are discussed.

When two orthographically siniilar words are briefly and successively displayed, the second word is often difficult to detect or recall, a deficit known as repetition blindness, or RB (Kanwisher, 1987). Two experiments used word-nonword pairs to test predictions of a computational model based on similarity inhibition (Bavelier & Jordan, 1992) vs. predictions of a sublexical model (Harris & Morris, 1996, 1997; Moms & Harris, 1997). One striking finding was of strong RB even for a single repeated letter (cope carn; hot hix). Results generally supported a sublexical model where only the shared letters are affected by RB, and each shared letter can be differentially affected in a probabilistic manner.