Five experiments investigated the recognition of proper names and common nouns using the lexical decision paradigm. In Experiments 1-3 the case of the initial letter of written stimuli was systematically varied. An advantage was consistently found for proper names written with the first letter in capital. Crucially, response times to proper names with the first letter in lowercase and to common nouns irrespective of the case of the first letter did not differ from each other. No difference between proper names and common nouns emerged in Experiment 4 where the stimuli were presented auditorily, and in Experiment 5 where a visual lexical decision task was performed with illegal non-words. The pattern of results shows that the proper name advantage is orthographic in nature and rules out an account in terms of semantic, morphological or other lexical variables. A model is proposed in which information about the case of the first letter is specified in the abstract multidimensional orthographic representation mediating written word recognition.

中文翻译：

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关于识别专有名词：正字法线索假设

五个实验使用词汇决策范式研究了专有名词和普通名词的识别。在实验 1-3 中，书面刺激的首字母的情况有系统地变化。始终发现首字母大写的专有名称具有优势。至关重要的是，对首字母小写的专有名称和普通名词的响应时间，无论首字母的大小写如何，都没有区别。在以听觉呈现刺激的实验 4 和使用非法非单词执行视觉词汇决策任务的实验 4 中，专有名称和常用名词之间没有差异。结果模式表明，专名优势在本质上是拼写的，在语义上排除了一个帐户，形态或其他词汇变量。提出了一种模型，在该模型中，在抽象多维正字法表示中指定了有关第一个字母的大小写的信息，以调解书面单词识别。