NAMING AND LEXICAL DECISION LATENCIES FOR 300 DUTCH NONWORDS

A central problem in current theorizing about word processing is the q uestion to what extent printed words are processed via a direct visual and/or an indirect phonological route. Several procedures have been u sed to study this topic, such as lexical decision, backward masking, a nd priming. The question concerning the contribution of both routes in visual word processing is interesting within the Dutch language as we ll and can be studied using the same procedures. It is interesting bec ause there are considerable differences between Dutch and English in t he way written symbols represent sounds. As the spelling-sound corresp ondence is much more restricted and straightforward in Dutch the large r correspondence might imply that phonological recoding is a more impo rtant route in Dutch than in English. However, research in Dutch has b een seriously hindred so far, because there were no nonwords available in the literature. The present study is a first attempt to construct 300 Dutch nonwords (100 pseudohomophones, 100 graphemic masks, and 100 unrelated masks), which have been validated with a naming experiment and a lexical decision task.