Stimuli

The stimuli were 1368 words or wordlike four- to eight-character strings (mean = 5.8). The stimuli were divided into five types: (1) words □in the French lexicon, (2) pseudowords, which were orthographic patterns that followed the rules of the French phonology and orthography (e.g., “lartuble”), (3) orthographically illegal nonwords that were unpronounceable consonant letter strings (e.g., “rtgdfs”), (4) strings of alphanumeric symbols such as “&@$£,” and (5) strings of forms □such as “y[ .” The pseudowords were constructed by substituting two letters in the selected words. Among the 432 words, 400 were concrete (e.g., placard) and 32 abstract (e.g., amour). The mean frequency of the concrete words was 1250, 1280, 1083, and 1720 (per 10 millions, Imbs, 1971) for the size, rhyme, lexical decision, and semantic decision tasks, respectively. A one-way ANOVA showed that the difference between the frequencies of these groups was not significant (□(3, 336) < 1.00). The mean frequency of the abstract words was 6228 per 10 million, higher than the mean frequency of the concrete words (1343 per 10 million). This difference, however, was irrelevant to the comparisons made in the present study because abstract words were only used as targets in the oddball task and never compared with other word types.