REPETITION BLINDNESS BETWEEN WORDS - NATURE OF THE ORTHOGRAPHIC AND PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS INVOLVED

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to recall the second instance of a rapidly presented word. Five experiments investigated the orthog raphic and phonological representations involved in RB. Experiments 1 and 2 found that the RB effect between orthographic neighbors is modul ated by the relative frequency of the words, but not their absolute fr equency. Experiment 3 showed that the reduced RB effect between neighb ors as compared with identical words is due to the reduced orthographi c overlap, not to a lack of morphological or semantic overlap. Experim ents 4 and 5 showed that the RB effect occurs between phonologically r elated items and that phonological and frequency properties of the tar get's orthographic neighbors affect the size of the effect. We conclud e that orthographic RB and phonological RB are sensitive to the target 's neighborhood organization and arise from similar mechanisms, but at different stages of processing.