In list learning paradigms with free recall, written recall has been found to be less susceptible to intrusions of related concepts than spoken recall when the list items had been visually presented. This effect has been ascribed to the use of stored orthographic representations from the study phase during written recall (Kellogg, 2001). In other memory retrieval paradigms, by contrast, either ...

Letters are identified better when they are embedded within words rather than within pseudowords, a phenomenon known as the word superiority effect (Reicher in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 275-280, 1969). This effect is, inter alia, accounted for by the interactive-activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart in Psychological Review, 88, 375-407, 1981) through feedback from word to lette...

Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder where patients lose the ability to read fast and fluently, but are commonly able to identify words letter-by-letter. This is evidenced by a pronounced word-length effect in reading, where reaction times (RTs) increase linearly with word length. The severity of the reading deficit in pure alexia has been reported to be systematically related to perform...