A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test stimuli in a target-search task. Results showed that words were recognized better than their corresponding equally well-structured anagrams, but that word frequency had little effect. Orthographically regular anagrams were recognized better than irregular anagrams, whereas log bigram frequency did not have an effect. In contrast, post hoc correlations revealed that log bigram frequency did correlate significantly with individual item performance. In a final experiment, subjects judged which of a pair of letter strings most resembled English in terms of either the frequency or the regularity of letter sequences. Findings revealed an influence of essentially the same dimensions of orthographic structure as that revealed by the perceptual recognition task. The overall results provided evidence for lexical status, regularity of letter sequencing, and frequency of letter sequencing as important dimensions in the psychologically real description of orthographic structure. (Author/FL)