Models of visual word recognition share the assumption that lexical access is based on abstract letter identities. The present study re-examined the assumption that this is because information about the visual form of the letter is lost early in the course of activating the abstract letter identities. The main support for this assumption has come from the case-independent masked priming effects. Experiment 1 used common English words presented in lowercase as targets in lexical decision, and replicated the oft-reported case-independent identity priming effect (e.g., edge-edge = EDGE-edge). In contrast, Experiment 2 using abbreviations (e.g., DNA, CIA) produced a robust case-dependent identity priming effect (e.g., DNA-DNA < dna-DNA). Experiment 3 used the same abbreviation stimuli as primes in a semantic priming lexical decision experiment. Here the prime case effect was absent, but so was the semantic priming effect (e.g., dna-GENETICS = DNA-GENETICS = LSD-GENETICS). The results question the view that information about the visual form of the letter is lost early. We offer an alternative perspective that the abstract nature of priming for common words stems from how these words are represented in the reader’s lexicon. The implication of these findings for letter and word recognition is discussed.

视觉单词识别模型都假设词汇访问基于抽象字母标识。本研究重新检验了这样一种假设，即这是因为在激活抽象字母身份的过程中，关于字母视觉形式的信息在早期就丢失了。对这一假设的主要支持来自与案例无关的蒙面启动效应。实验 1 使用以小写字母表示的常用英语单词作为词汇决策的目标，并复制了经常报告的与大小写无关的身份启动效应（例如，edge-edge = EDGE-edge）。相反，使用缩写词（例如，DNA、CIA）的实验 2 产生了强大的依赖于大小写的身份启动效应（例如，DNA-DNA < dna-DNA）。实验 3 在语义启动词汇决策实验中使用与素数相同的缩写刺激。这里没有主要案例效应，但也没有语义启动效应（例如，dna-GENETICS = DNA-GENETICS = LSD-GENETICS）。结果质疑有关字母视觉形式的信息很早就丢失的观点。我们提供了另一种观点，即常用词启动的抽象性质源于这些词在读者词典中的表示方式。讨论了这些发现对字母和单词识别的影响。