Length effects in word perception: We is better than I but worse than you or them

D. D. Wheeler's (1970) finding that the words I and A do not have the same advantage as other words, despite their lexical status, was replicated in 3 experiments (54 high school Ss). This result held even under conditions designed to influence Ss to process I and A as words. The poor performance on these single-letter words was shown to be a manifestation of a more general length effect: Recognition of briefly presented words improves with increasing length (up to 3 or 4 letters). The perceptual advantage for longer words was not found for closely matched strings of unrelated letters. The strength and robustness of the word-length effect suggest that theories of the word advantage must include mechanisms that are length dependent. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).