The use of abstract graphemic information in lexical access

Three experiments investigated the nature of the information required for the lexical access of visual words. A four-field masking procedure was used, in which the presentation of consecutive prime and target letter strings was preceded and followed by presentations of a pattern mask. This procedure prevented subjects from identifying, and thus intentionally using, prime information. Experiment I extablished the existence of a semantic priming effect on target identification, demonstrating the lexical access of primes under these conditions. It also showed a word repetition effect independent of letter case. Experiment II tested whether this repetition effect was due to the activation of graphemic or phonemic information. The graphemic and phonemic similarity of primes and targets was varied. No evidence for phonemic priming was found, although a graphemic priming effect, independent of the physical similarity of the stimuli, was obtained. Finally Experiment III demonstrated that, irrespective of whether the prime was a word or a nonword, graphemic priming was equally effective. In both Experiments II and III, however, the word repetition effect was stronger than the graphemic priming effect. It is argued that facilitation from graphemic priming was due to the prime activating a target representation coded for abstract (non-visual) graphemic features, such as letter identities. The extra facilitation from same identity priming was attributed to semantic as well as graphemic activation. The implications of these results for models of word recognition are discussed.     

Repetition blindness has a perceptual locus: evidence from online processing of targets in RSVP streams

Four experiments tested whether repetition blindness (RB; reduced accuracy reporting repetitions of briefly displayed items) is a perceptual or a memory-recall phenomenon. RB was measured in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams, with the task altered to reduce memory demands. In Experiment 1 only the number of targets (1 vs. 2) was reported, eliminating the need to remember target identities. Experiment 2 segregated repeated and nonrepeated targets into separate blocks to reduce bias against repeated targets. Experiments 3 and 4 required immediate "online" buttonpress responses to targets as they occurred. All 4 experiments showed very strong RB. Furthermore, the online response data showed clearly that the 2nd of the repeated targets is the one missed. The present results show that in the RSVP paradigm, RB occurs online during initial stimulus encoding and decision making. The authors argue that RB is indeed a perceptual phenomenon.     

Masked priming of words and nonwords in a naming task: Further evidence for a nonlexical basis for priming

Masked priming effects in word identification tasks such as lexical decision and word naming have been attributed to a lexical mechanism whereby the masked prime opens a lexical entry corresponding to the target word. Two experiments are reported in which masked repetition priming effects of similar magnitude were obtained with word and nonword targets in a naming task. Masked orthographic priming was more stable for word than for nonword targets, although morphological primes produced no advantage beyond that achieved by matched orthographic primes. These results, taken together with the recent finding that repetition priming of nonwords can be obtained in the lexical decision task, support the view that masked priming of words and nonwords has a nonlexical component. We suggest that masked primes can enhance target identification by contributing to the construction of an orthographic or a phonological representation of the target, regardless of the target's lexical status.     

RSVP任务下双刺激重复的优势与劣势

本研究探讨重复知盲发生在知觉阶段还是在记忆阶段。采用快速视觉系列呈现(rapid serial visual representation, 简称RSVP)任务, 让被试即时回忆80个词表中呈现的词。操作了词表中目标词的重复数, 分为无重复、单刺激重复(重复一对)和双刺激重复(重复两对)三种, 和目标词的情绪效价, 分为中性词和情绪词两种。结果发现, 对目标词回忆的正确率是：当目标词和非目标词都是中性词汇, 即二者的情绪效价强度相当时(实验1), 在无重复条件与双刺激重复条件下无差异, 二者均大于单刺激重复条件; 当目标词是消极词汇, 非目标词是中性词汇, 即目标刺激的情绪效价强度大于非目标刺激时(实验2), 无重复条件与单刺激重复条件无差异, 二者均大于双刺激重复条件。结果表明：(1)RSVP 任务下词表中有双刺激重复时, 如果刺激的效价强度相当, 出现重复优势; 如果目标刺激的效价强度高于非目标刺激, 出现重复劣势; (2)人们会主动分配更多的注意资源给效价高的刺激, 重复知盲产生在记忆阶段, 支持注意资源分配最优化假设。     

The generation effect: Further tests of the lexical activation hypothesis

Three experiments compared recognition memory for word versus nonword responses when they had been either read or generated using a rhyme rule and either a word or nonword stimulus. That is, either the wordshop or the nonwordthop was generated from either the wordchop or the nonwordphop. In Experiment 1, the lexicality of the stimulus and response terms was manipulated orthogonally between subjects; in Experiments 2 and 3, it was manipulated orthogonally within subjects. In Experiment 3, subjects also made a lexical (word-nonword) decision about each response term after it had been read or generated. In all three experiments, memory performance was better for generated than read responses. This generation effect occurred only if the response term was a word, regardless of whether the stimulus term was a word or a nonword. These results are discussed in terms of the roles that lexical memory and response unitization play in the generation effect.     

Phonologically related lexical repetition disorder: a case study

Errors of repetition in aphasia are most often nonword substitutions. Phonologically related lexical errors, or formal errors, are real-word substitutions that overlap with target words in sound. In the present research we present the case of an aphasic patient, MMB, who produced an unusually high rate of formal paraphasias in repetition. Six experiments were conducted to investigate the combination of impairments contributing to MMB's pattern of repetition and to test the predictions made by two theories of formal errors. MMB's formal errors in repetition were influenced by target frequency, but not by target length or imageability. Formal errors tended to be more frequent than their targets and showed greatest phonological overlap with targets at initial consonant. These findings provided partial support for Martin and Saffran's fully interactive spreading activation account of formal errors and did not support Blanken's phonological interactive encoding account. In Experiment 6, the effect on repetition of increasing auditory verbal short-term memory (AVSTM) demands was examined using a paired word repetition experiment. Under these conditions, MMB produced semantic paraphasias for the first time, providing strong support for the Martin-Saffran hypothesis that phonologically related, and semantic, lexical repetition disorders lie on a continuum of severity moderated by the degree of AVSTM impairment.     

Repetition blindness in priming in perceptual identification: Competitive effects of a word intervening between prime and target

University students named a 72-ms masked target word that was preceded by two 120-ms consecutively presented words, a prime word followed by a distractor. In Experiment 1, all words were in lowercase letters, whereas in Experiment 2, the target word was changed to uppercase letters. In both experiments there was an accuracy and latency cost (repetition blindness: RB) when the prime was the same word as the target, with the cost much less severe in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. A low-frequency distractor impaired target identification compared with a high-frequency distractor. Distractor frequency interacted with target frequency such that high-frequency targets preceded by low-frequency distractors had the lowest accuracy. The results are consistent with a frequency-dependent competition for access to working memory among briefly displayed words. However, there was no clear evidence that effects of target repetition on interword competition play a role in RB. The effects of a letter case change for the target are consistent with a contribution of token distinctiveness to word-order recovery in the intervening-word priming task.     

Visual identity and uncertainty in repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in 6 experiments. In the first 3 experiments participants detected vowel targets in 11-letter sequences. When all letters were uppercase, detection was poorer for same (e.g., AA) than for different (e.g., AO) targets. However, when one target was uppercase and the other lowercase, RB was found only for targets visually identical except for size (e.g., Oo), not for visually different pairs (e.g., Aa). Experiment 4 found RB for visually identical versus different consonant-vowel-consonant words. Experiments 5 and 6 replicated Kanwisher's (1987) experiment in which RB was insensitive to word case but revealed these effects to be artifacts of poor recognition of 5-letter words coupled with a biased guessing strategy. Overall, these experiments found RB only at a low level of visual information processing.     

Response conflict reverses priming: a replication

Subjects named target words that followed a masked prime word of 33-msec (Experiments 1A and 1B) or 200-msec (Experiment 2) duration. The target word was either presented alone or accompanied by an interleaved distractor word. Targets presented alone were named more quickly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (repetition priming). In Experiment 1A, targets with distractors were named more slowly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (negative priming), replicating Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seiffert (Psychological Review, 1998). In Experiments 1B and 2, repetition priming was reduced, although not reversed, for targets with distractors. The results of all three experiments are opposite to the usual finding of enhanced priming for perceptually degraded targets and suggest that response conflict engages retrospective mechanisms that counteract the facilitatory effects of priming.     

Inhibitory phonetic priming: Where does the effect come from?

Both phonological and phonetic priming studies reveal inhibitory effects that have been interpreted as resulting from lexical competition between the prime and the target. We present a series of phonetic priming experiments that contrasted this lexical locus explanation with that of a prelexical locus by manipulating the lexical status of the prime and the target and the task used. In the related condition of all experiments, spoken targets were preceded by spoken primes that were phonetically similar but shared no phonemes with the target (/bak/–/dεt/). In Experiments 1 and 2, word and nonword primes produced an inhibitory effect of equal size in shadowing and same–different tasks respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 showed robust inhibitory phonetic priming on both word and nonword targets in the shadowing task, but no effect at all in a lexical decision task. Together, these findings show that the inhibitory phonetic priming effect occurs independently of the lexical status of both the prime and the target, and only in tasks that do not necessarily require the activation of lexical representations. Our study thus argues in favour of a prelexical locus for this effect.     

Effect of direction of sequential presentation and redundancy on short-term recognition memory

Short-term recognition memory was tested by presenting six letters, one after the other, followed by a target letter and having S indicate whether or not the target matched one of the six letters. Recognition memory for a letter was better when it was embedded in a six-letter word, rather than a nonword, and when it was included in a sequence presented left-to-right, rather than right-to-left (Experiment 1). Reducing the presentation rate from 4/sec to 2.5/sec largely eliminated the left-to-right effect (Experiment 2). The effect of direction of presentation was greater for redundant (Experiment 1) than for nonredundant sequences (Experiment 3) and was greater for Ss who more frequently formed a word out of the sequence (Experiments 1 and 2), but was no greater for words than nonwords (Experiments 1 and 2) and no greater for letter than for line-figure sequences (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that the left-to-right effect depends as much, or more, on “peripheral” processes (e.g., eye movements) as on “central” processes (e.g., reading).     

A study of masked form priming in picture and word naming

We report a series of picture- and word-naming experiments in which the masked priming paradigm with prime exposures brief enough to prevent prime identification were used. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the prior presentation of the same word prime facilitates both picture and word naming independently of target frequency. In Experiments 2 and 3, primes that were pseudohomophones of picture targets produced facilitatory effects compared with orthographic controls, but these orthographically similar nonword primes did not facilitate picture naming compared with unrelated controls. On the other hand, word targets were primarily facilitated by orthographic prime— target overlap. This marked dissociation in the priming effects obtained with picture and word targets is discussed in relation to different explanations of masked form priming effects in visual word recognition and current models of picture and word naming.     

Being forward not backward: lexical limits to masked priming

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make targets unfamiliar. Participants were required to read a target string from right to left (i.e., "ECAF" should be read as "FACE") and then make a response. To examine if priming was based on lexical representations, repetition primes consisted of words when read forwards or backwards (e.g., "face", "ecaf") and nonwords (e.g., "pame", "emap"). Forward and backward primes were used to test if task instruction affected prime encoding. The lexical decision and naming tasks showed the same pattern of results: priming only occurred for forward primes with word targets (e.g., "face-ECAF"). Additional experiments to test if response priming affected the LDT indicated that the lexical status of the prime per se did not affect target responses. These results showed that the encoding of masked primes was unaffected by the novel task instruction and support the view that masked priming is due to the automatic triggering of pre-established computational processes based on stored information.     

Effects of prime and target eccentricity on masked repetition priming

Three experiments examined the influence of briefly presented, pattern-masked prime stimuli on target word recognition at varying eccentricities. The prime was either the same word as the targets or a different word, and prime position varied horizontally from a central fixation point. The targets were either in the same location as the primes (Experiment 1A) or always centrally located (Experiments 1B and 2). In Experiment 1A, target word recognition showed a typical right visual field advantage, and priming effects diminished with increasing prime and target eccentricity. With centrally located targets, priming effects tended to be more constrained by prime location. After eye fixation location and prime visibility were controlled for (Experiment 2), a right visual field advantage for priming effects was also evident for central targets, suggesting an influence of endogenous attentional biases in masked repetition priming.     

Feature and conjunction effects in recognition memory: Toward specifying familiarity for compound words

In three experiments, we evaluated potential sources of familiarity in the production of feature and conjunction errors with both word (Experiments 1 and 3) and nonword (Experiment 2) stimuli and related this work to various dual-process models of memory. The contributions of letter, syllable, lexical morpheme, and conceptual information were considered. Lexical morpheme information was consistently more potent than syllable information in leading to feature and conjunction errors across Experiments 1 and 2, and a word length explanation did not account for this consistent finding. In addition, there was no impact of conceptual information on these errors (Experiments 1-3). The results support a familiarity-based interpretation of feature and conjunction errors and a lexical morpheme basis for the familiarity in compound words. In order to be more comprehensive, memory models may need to account for a lexical morpheme source of familiarity.     

Testing the direct-access model: GOD does not prime DOG

In three repetition priming experiments that employed identical (e.g., DOG-DOG) and reversed repetitions (e.g., GOD-DOG), it was found that relative to controls (e.g., DOG-DOG), GOD-type words did not prime DOG-type words. Also, neither DUT-type nor TUD-type nonwords primed DUT-type nonwords. In Experiments 1 and 2, these results occurred using both long- and short-term repetition priming conditions, respectively. In Experiment 3, the word results held under conditions of short-term priming coupled with stimulus misorientation. However, the nonword results resembled the word results (i.e., identical but not reversed repetitions primed nonwords). The failure to provide explicit evidence for direct visual access (e.g., GOD does not prime DOG while DOG does) irrespective of other sources of lexical activation supports theories of word recognition that postulate multiple and varied lexical representations that are activated through a matrix of connections.     

A dissociative word-frequency X levels-of-processing interaction in episodic recognition and lexical decision tasks

The effects of levels-of-processing and word frequency were directly compared in three different memory tests. In the episodic recognition test, the subjects decided whether or not a word or a pronounceable nonword had been previously studied. In the two lexical decision tests with either pronounceable or unpronounceable nonwords as distractors, the subjects decided whether a test item was a word or a nonword. There were four main results: (1) in all three tests, reaction times (RTs) in response to studied words were faster if they had received semantic rather than rhyme processing during study; (2) in the episodic recognition test, RTs were faster for low- than for high-frequency words; in both lexical decision tests, RTs were faster for high- than for low-frequency words, though less so when the nonword distractors were unpronounceable; (3) prior study facilitated lexical decisions more in response to low- than to high-frequency words, thereby attenuating the word-frequency effect, but more so when the nonword distractors were pronounceable; (4) in the lexical decision test with pronounceable nonword distractors, relative to prior rhyme processing, prior semantic processing facilitated performance more for high- than for low-frequency words, whereas the opposite was the case in the episodic recognition test. Discussion focused on the relationship of these results to current views of the mechanisms by which (1) word frequency and depth of processing affect performance in implicit and explicit memory tests, and (2) repetition priming attenuates word-frequency effects for lexical decisions.     

Dynamic relationships between phonological memory and reading: A five year longitudinal study from age 4 to 9

We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics‐educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short‐term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word‐level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial‐order memory for letter‐by‐letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme‐level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE .     

Kanji lexicality effect in partial repetition priming: the relationship between Kanji word and Kanji character processing.

Two experiments are described using a partial repetition priming paradigm. The prime type was whether a kanji character is used as a word by itself (word type) or not (nonword type). This property is called kanji lexicality. In Experiment 1, the effect of kanji lexicality was not confirmed, although there was a tendency in the responses for word-type primes to be slower than those for nonword-type primes. In Experiment 2, the kanji lexicality effect depended upon the target familiarity, and no facilitation was obtained for high-familiarity words with word-type primes. The results were interpreted in terms of a modified interactive-activation framework.     

On obtaining episodic priming in a lexical decision task following paired-associate learning

In four experiments, subjects made lexical (word-nonword) decisions to target letter strings after studying paired associates. In this lexical decision test, word targets previously studied as response terms in the paired associates were preceded at a 150-ms and/or 950-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) by one of various subsets of the following six types of primes: a neutral (XXX or ready) prime, a semantically unrelated word prime episodically related to the target through its having been previously studied in the same pair, a semantically related word prime previously studied in a pair with some other unrelated word, a semantically unrelated word prime previously studied in a pair with some other unrelated word, a nonstudied semantically related word prime, and a nonstudied semantically unrelated word prime. At the 950-ms SOA, facilitation of lexical decisions produced by the episodically related primes was greater in test lists in which there were no 150-ms SOA trials intermixed, no previously studied semantically related primes, and no studied nonword targets. At the 150-ms SOA, facilitation from episodic priming was greater in test lists in which there were no semantically related primes and all studied word targets and no studied nonword targets. Facilitation effects from semantically related primes were small in magnitude and occurred inconsistently. Discussion focused on the implications these results have for the episodic-semantic memory distinction and the automaticity of episodic and semantic priming effects.