Twenty-two subjects completed two blocks of trials in which each involved presentation of Japanese words and foreign loan words written in katakana requiring a lexical classification. In the first block, words and non-words were presented, and in the second block, original words in addition to new words were presented. Reaction times in the lexical classification were facilitated when Japanese words were repeated but no such facilitation was shown for foreign loan words. The results suggest that orthographic familiarity plays an important role in word recognition.
