one of the findings of the johnston and mcclelland reportwas that the wse does not occur inevitably whenever we compare a word and a nonword. rather, it depends somewhat upon the strategies that readers use during a task. if readers paid more attention to the letter in a particular "position", they would experience the adverse word superiority effect. this is because the reader would no longer have the benefit of having the word detector level activated with as much weight if they neglected to focus on the full word.