Mixed case and masking interact in word recognition

The purpose of the present experiment was to determine if mixed letter case (e.g., MiXeD cAsE) and stimulus degradation (masking produced by overprinted backslash characters) interact in a word naming task. A 2 ×2 factorial design was used with 26 college students in a list pronunciation format. Both variables had a significant effect on pronunciation time and on errors. Additionally, mixed case and masking interacted in an overadditive fashion on both dependent variable measures. The data were interpreted as support for a model of human information processing in which both mixed case and masking affect the feature-extraction stage of processing.

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