At 02:31 PM 10/17/99 -0400, you wrote:
>*Miguel, thanks for your comments and the references. The
>*point I would stress, however, is that phonology hypothesis
>*cannot account for the many misses of "Ns" in my second
>*passage (that was the whole point of using Ns; they're
>*pronounced the same way in ON and IN as in NEARLY
>*NEVER). My uncontrolled class experiments suggest that
>*phonology might not be the WHOLE story for letter misses
>*such as these.
Clearly, I did not read your post as carefully as I should have for you make
the above point and the point regarding the phonological code in your original
post.
You know, I carried out a short letter detection study with one of my students
some years ago where we found a sex difference favoring women. The only
explanation that we could come up with was our speculation that perhaps women
tended to activate a more reflective information processing strategy in these
types of detail-oriented tasks. Soon after I later did two a follow-up study
where we timed Ss and also added a control condition where we altered the
spacing of the words (e.g, weal teredth e spac ingof t hewords) and had a
mirror-image control condition (e.g., sdrow eht fo gnicaps eht deretla ew). We
again obtained the sex difference in the regular text condition but not in the
other two control conditions. BTW, females were slower than males in
completing the task, but the difference had not reached statistical significance.
As I am thinking about your demonstration, I can kick myself in the rear
because just this summer I had to throw all that raw data out to make room for
the ever growing accumulation of more recent papers, data, etc. Otherwise, I
might have asked our grad assistant to separate short strings of letters vs.
longer strings to see if your effect is there. Oh, well. At any rate, if I
had to guess, I'd say that your 'preposition' effect is probably more
pronounced in female than in male subjects. I would have expected that the
effect would be nearly absent in the mirror image or altered spacing condition.
Oh, do I wish I had access to that data again. =(
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Miguel Roig, Ph.D. Voice: (718) 390-4513
Assoc. Prof. of Psychology Fax: (718) 442-3612
Dept. of Psychology [EMAIL PROTECTED]
St. John's University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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