Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effect of orthographic familiarity on letter naming latency. The experiments used a procedure developed by Hatae and Hatta (1981) in which a test letter is presented for naming to foveal vision, and irrelevant stimuli from a variety of orthographies are presented to parafoveal vision.
In Experiment l, English monolinguals and English Japanese bilinguals named English test letters. The results showed that relative to a control condition not including parafoveal stimuli, reaction times were increased for the monolingual group only when English letters were presented in parafoveal visual field. For the bilingual group however, significant interference also occurred for Hirakana and Katakana.
In Experiment 2, English Japanese and Japanese-English bilinguals named Hirakana letters. The results demonstrated that the extent to which a secondary orthography is established determines its capacity to influence processing efficiency when its letters are presented to parafoveal vision. But no support was found for the claim that the greater influence occurs when the relevant and irrelevant stimuli belong to the same orthography than when they do not.