Familiarity effects and word unitization in visual comparison tasks

The decision that two words are identical is made more quickly than the decision that two non-words are identical. This familiarity effect was shown to be larger in a simultaneous matching task than in a sequential matching task. In the simultaneous task, two words were not matched as quickly as a single letter and a letter in a predesignated location within a word. The latter finding rules out a perceptual unitization account of the familiarity effect (Silverman, 1985). The familiarity effect was interpreted to be due to the facilitated encoding of a comparison item when a holistic cognitive unit representing the target is activated in memory.