Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

Prior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and n. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muneca-type words (muneca-MUNECA < museca-MUNECA), but not for moneda-type words (moneda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.