'A Rows is a Rose' Summary of a Van Orden Experiement

Both words would be spelled similiar enough to the base word to determine whether or not the sound of the first word had effected whether or not the next words where identifible. To respond in the positive would mean the subject identified the target word as part of the base word's catagory. The base word represented a catagory and the subject was told to say yes if the words presented were part of that catagory. The subject would be flashed 172 words, the first fifty of which would be practice trails, and be asked to say yes or no.

The first experiement was intended to isolate the orthological aspect of identification. The entire test was based upon negative responses, in which the subjects only said 'no' if the word they saw was not a real word. This test consisted of constructed normal words that were not actually words but sounded the same as certain real words which were presented along with it. This understanding is the reasoning behind the tests being based upon positive responses rather then negative ones. Immediately after each target word there was a pattern mask, or set of random letters or symbols, to prevent the image of the word reocurring mentally while the subject thought. The timing of the displays was set up so that the base word would be shown for only 1500 msec while the target words were shown for 500 msec. person reads their mind responds quickly to everything that matches up as a word and stops to concentrate when it reads something that is not identifible as a word ( or at least a known word). The results of the test were then based on the number of times people made the mistake of saying yes to the two simliar words.

Van Orden took some of this understanding from an experiement done by Coltheart and Rubenstein, in which they did a test using pseudohomophones. This test revealed that the negative responses were slower then the 'normal' process of positive identification in reading.