368 Table 5 Mean reaction times (RTs, in milliseconds) and error rates (in percentages) for words split for word length Bilinguals Cue absent (roomijs) Cue present (roomkaas) Effect (cue absent minus cue present) Native speakers Cue absent (vrachtrijder) Cue present (vrachtverkeer) Effect (cue absent minus cue present) Standard deviations for means and effects are given between parentheses The mean error rate for words was 9.7%. For the analysis of reaction times (RTs), erroneous responses were excluded pairwise (i.e., together with their matched item) for each participant. Outliers that lay more than two standard deviations away from the item and participant mean were excluded in the same manner. This way, a total of 81.0% of the original data were used in the RT analyses (native speakers, 90.3%; bilinguals, 70.8%). The mean RTs and error rates are given in Table 3. Reaction times Because of the extreme differences in RTs between the two participant groups (more than 300 ms on average), we z-transformed the RTs separately for each group to make them more comparable to each other.3 Repeated measures ANOVAs across participant and item means were carried out on z-transformed RTs with cue presence as a within-participants and within-items pairs factor, and participant group as a between-participants, within-items factor. There was a main effect of cue presence, F1 (1, 36) = 9.87, p < 0.01; F2 (1, 47) = 4.07, p < 0.05. Words without cues were recognized more slowly (untransformed mean RT = 777 ms) than those with cues (751 ms). Due to the standardization by z-transformation, there was no effect of participant group (both Fs < 1). Crucially, cue presence and participant group did not interact (both Fs < 1).4 When adding experimental half as a factor to investigate the effect of first constituent repetition, it did not interact with any other factor (all ps > 0.35). 3 The effect of participant group was highly significant when analyzing untransformed RTs, F1(1, 36) = 64,80, p < 0.001; F2 (1, 47) = 589.84, p < 0.001. 4 The effect for native speakers was significant (marginally across items) when analyzed separately for this group, t1(19) = 2.33, p < 0.05; t2(47) = 1.30, p = 0.095. Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:364–370 Short words RT 912 (202) 878 (155) 34 (78) 568 (71) 576 (84) -8 (32) Error rate RT 22.0 (15.2) 20.1 (12.2) 1.9 (12.8) 2.9 (3.6) 6.7 (6.4) -3.8 (5.5) Long words 974 (159) 939 (196) 35 (106) 631 (77) 599 (86) 32 (35) Error rate 16.9 (9.4) 17.5 (10.6) –0.6 (9.6) 9.5 (8.2) 2.9 (3.2) 6.6 (7.9) Error rates Error rates were arcsine transformed to correct for nonnormality in their distributions and were subjected to ANOVAs that were parallel to those carried out on RTs. There was no effect of cue presence, F1(1, 36) = 1.77, p = 0.19; F2 < 1. Not surprisingly, bilinguals had higher error rates (19.1%) than did native speakers (5.5%), F1 (1, 36) = 37.42, p < 0.001; F2 (1, 47) = 56.25, p < 0.001. Neither the interaction of the two factors, nor interactive effects involving experimental half, were significant (all Fs < 1). Unfamiliar words Excluding words participant-wise that had been marked as unfamiliar (10.3%) together with their pair partners (together, 17.8%) did not change the RT results for the bilinguals: There was a significant 37-ms cue–presence effect in the RTs, t(17) = 2.42, p < 0.05, and an insignificant 2.3% effect in the error rates, t(17) = 1.12, p = 0.14. Long versus short compounds After having confirmed an orthotactic effect, we investi- gated in a post hoc analysis whether the cue effect was modulated by the length of the compounds, as was suggested by Bertram et al. (2004). Possibly, speakers decompose only long compounds (longer than approxi- mately nine letters), whereas they process short ones holistically. If so, the cue effect should arise for long words only. Therefore, we divided the word pairs into those with long and short words (longer or shorter than 10 letters, which was the median length of our compounds).5 Six word pairs had to be excluded from this analysis, because their two members could not be assigned to the same length 5 An exception was one word pair with nine and 10 letters, which was assigned to the shorter group for the sake of equal group sizes.