Abstract
[Naming and Lexical Decision Latencies for Three Hundred Dutch Nonwords]
A central problem in current theorizing about word processing is the question to what extent printed words arc processed via a direct visual and/or an indirect phonological route. Several procedures have been used to study this topic, such as lexical decision, backward masking, and priming. The question concerning the contribution of both routes in visual word processing is interesting within the Dutch language as well and can be studied using the same procedures. It is interesting because there are considerable differences between Dutch and English in the way written symbols represent sounds. As the spelling-sound correspondence is much more restricted and straightforward in Dutch the larger correspondence might imply that phonological recoding is a more important route in Dutch than in English. However, research in Dutch has been seriously hindred so far, because there were no nonwords available in the literature. The present study is a first attempt to construct 300 Dutch nonwords (100 pseudohomophones, 100 graphemic masks, and 100 unrelated masks), which have been validated with a naming experiment and a lexical decision task.