Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is extensive evidence that structural regularities affect the processing of visually-presented words. However,it is not known whether the processing consequences of an orthographic violation are limited to the offending subpart (e.g.,an unattested onset cluster) or apply more globally (e.g., to the entire word). We provide evidence of global disruption fromthe recall of briefly-presented nonwords that were manipulated for degree of orthographic markedness and length. Error rateswere higher for both the initial and final portions of nonwords beginning with more marked onsets; symmetrically, report ofmarked onsets was degraded in words with longer endings. These effects suggest that, as in other visual tasks, the fidelity withwhich one element can be represented depends on the overall stimulus complexity. We present a modified version of rationalmodels of visual word perception in which global effects result from the distribution of a limited processing resource over letterpositions.