Abstract

The Simon effect consists of a faster and more accurate performance when spatial responses correspond to irrelevant-spatial stimuli than when they do not. Simon effect and its time course were investigated with meaningless linguistic stimuli (nowords) and meaningful linguistic stimuli (words) no spatial defined. Participants performed a lexical decision task by a right or left keypress, while ignoring the location of stimuli. Results showed that the Simon effect and its time course are modulated by the kind of stimuli. We found a significant decreasing Simon effect only for the no-words; while for words the Simon effect did not emerge and its time course did not show variations.