The impact of consonant–vowel transpositions on masked priming effects in Italian and English

There are now a number of reports in the literature that transposed letter (TL) priming effects emerge when two consonants are transposed (e.g., caniso-CASINO) but not when two vowels are transposed (e.g., cinaso-CASINO). In the present article, four masked priming lexical decision experiments, two in Italian and two in English, are reported in which TL priming effects involving the transposition of two adjacent consonants (e.g., atnenna-ANTENNA) were contrasted with those involving the transposition of a vowel and an adjacent consonant (e.g., anetnna-ANTENNA), a contrast not directly examined in the previous literature. In none of the experiments was there any indication that the priming effects were different sizes for the two types of transpositions, including Experiment 4 in which a sandwich priming paradigm was used. These results support the assumption of most orthographic coding models that the consonant–vowel status of the letters is not relevant to the nature of the orthographic code. The question of how to reconcile these results with other TL manipulations investigating vowel versus consonant transpositions is discussed.