Color-word contingency learning with unfamiliar characters.

The color-word contingency learning effect is the finding that when identifying the colors of letter strings in stimulus sets in which color is highly, though not perfectly, correlated with string identity, participants respond faster to strings for which a color predominates than to strings for which a color does not predominate. English readers exhibit this effect rapidly when strings are English words. We investigated performance by English readers when the strings were Korean words; after completing the task with Korean stimuli, participants responded to English stimuli. We hypothesized that when strings consist of unfamiliar characters, so are likely less codable and possibly less discriminable, the color-word contingency learning effect would manifest later or not at all. With Korean words, we observed a statistically significant color-word contingency effect only in the sixth of eight trial blocks, whereas with English words, we observed the color-word contingency effect in six blocks, including the first two.