The word superiority effect in a case ofHiragana letter strings

This paper is concerned with the effect of syllabification in the superior perceptibility of tachistoscopically presented JapaneseHiragana letter strings. TheHiragana letter is a phonetic symbol having an invariant one-syllable pronunciation. Controlling retention and guessing factors, an experiment replicated the original Reicher (1969) findings of a word superiority effect. Thus, the results suggest that letter unitization which depends upon syllable-like structures (the vocalic center groups; Spoehr & Smith, 1973) is not a prerequisite, but that orthographic regularity and meaningfulness may be important determinants of the word superiority effect.