The effect of meaningfulness in tachistoscopic word perception

Studies of tachistoscopic word perception were reviewed under two theoretical headings: the structural approach, in which the variables of interest are linguistic relations among letters, and the lexical approach, where the interest is in the availability of words in lexical memory. The results of a recent tachistoscopic recognition study question the importance of lexical availability by finding no difference in performance between meaningful words and well-structured, pronounceable nonwords. In the present study, further comparisons between words and pronounceable nonwords were performed, and a meaningfulness effect was demonstrated. The generality of this finding was discussed, and alternative models accounting for the effect were considered. Two of these were capable of explaining structural effects as well as the meaningfulness effect: a translation model and a lexical discrimination net.