Introduction

The word superiority effect is a cognitive phenomenon where people are better able to detect a specific letter when it is part of a string of letters that forms a word (e.g. ‘STOP’) than when it is embedded among other letters that don’t produce a word (e.g. ‘OSTP’). The word superiority effect is observed even when the stimulus is presented so briefly that the person isn’t consciously aware of what they saw. The present experiment uses a paradigm that was developed by G. Reicher and D. Wheeler to study the word superiority effect.