Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) demonstrated that orthographic information is obligatorily activated during auditory word recognition by showing that rhyme decisions to orthographically similar rhymes pie-tie were quicker than rhyme decisions to orthographically dissimilar rhymes ryetie. This effect could be due to the fact that orthographic and phonological codes axe closely inter-related in lexical memory and the two dimensions are highly correlated. However, it could also be a example of a more general similarity bias in making rhyme decisions, in which subjects cannot ignore irrelevant information from other dimensions. W e explored this later possibility by having subjects make rhyme decisions to words that vary in orthographic similarity and also to words that vary in semantic similarity {good-kind, cruel-kind). This possibility is ruled out in two experiments in which we fail to find an interference effect with semantically related trials, while replicating the basic orthographic interference and facilitation results.