Abstract

The current study was planed to examine the effects of word length on visual word recognition. Linguistically, word length can be defined by several sublexical units like visual features, letters, phonemes, syllables, and morphemes. In order to investigate which units are used in visual word recognition, the immediate and delayed naming tasks were used. If a sublexical unit affects the immediate naming time but not the delayed naming time, then it means that this sublexical unit influences only the prearticulatory processes. And if word length interacts with word frequency(which is known to have an effect on lexical access), it can be inferred that word length influences lexical access. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that visual features, letters, phonemes, and syllables have effects on the prearticulatory processes in naming words and word length interacts with word frequency. These results are consistent with the prediction of the hierarchical model in visual word recognition and they indicate that word length has an effect on the lexical access.