Identity and Similarity in Repetition Blindness: No Cross-over Interaction

The difficulty in reporting both occurrences of a repeated item is a phenomenon referred to as repetition blindness (RB). RB has been proposed to result from temporal limitations in creating separate episodic tokens for a twice-activated type. Recently, Chialant and Caramazza (Cognition 63 (1997) 79-119) disputed the conventional view that RB for non-identical words (orthographic RB, as in lice and lick) results from the same mechanism as identity RB, and proposed that orthographic RB arises from competition for lexical selection. Supporting evidence was that identical and merely similar words showed different amounts of RB as a function of stimulus onset asynchrony (lag). Four experiments failed to replicate Chialant and Caramazza's finding that identity RB decreases, but orthographic RB increases, as a function of lag. Instead, RB for all stimuli, including homonym pairs, declined monotonically with lag. These results are consistent with a common mechanism underlying RB for identical and orthographically similar words and with prior research suggesting that RB in similar words occurs at a sublexical level.