Interpretation of orthographic uniqueness point effects in visual word recognition

The orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) of a word is the position of the first letter from the left that distinguishes a word from all other words. In 2 recent studies (P. J. Kwantes & D. J. K. Mewhort, 1999a; A. K. Lindell, M. E. R. Nicholls, & A. E. Castles, 2003), it has been observed that words with an early OUP were processed more quickly than words with a late OUP. This has been taken to suggest that observers process the letters of words sequentially in a left-to-right order. In this article, it is shown that the OUP results do not provide selective evidence for left-to-right sequential processing in visual word recognition because the data are also compatible with an account in which letter processing occurs in random order.