Priming and attentional control of lexical and sublexical pathways in naming: a reevaluation

The authors report 3 naming experiments using J. D. Zevin and D. A. Balota's (2000) multiple prime manipulation. They used 2 sets of nonword primes (fast and slow) and low-frequency exception word primes to separate the effects of prime speed from those of prime type. The size of the regularity effect was unaffected by prime type. Relative to the low-frequency exception word prime condition, the frequency effect was reduced in the fast, but not in the slow, nonword prime condition. Lexicality effect size was reduced in both nonword prime conditions, a result consistent with the lexical checking strategy described by S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, and L. Colombo (1997). The authors suggest that these results are better explained in terms of S. J. Lupker et al.'s time-criterion account than J. D. Zevin and D. A. Balota's pathway control hypothesis.     

Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: individual differences in masked form priming

This experiment investigated whether individual differences in written language proficiency among university students predict the early stages of lexical retrieval tapped by the masked form priming lexical decision task. To separate the contributions of sublexical facilitation and lexical competition to masked form priming, the effects of prime lexicality were directly compared for both transposed-letter (TL) primes (e.g., sung SNUG; salb SLAB) and neighbor primes (e.g., snag SNUG; sleb SLAB) in a sample of 100 university students assessed on measures of reading, spelling and vocabulary. The data for the whole sample showed facilitation from nonword primes, but inhibition from word primes. Linear mixed models including the individual difference measures showed that higher scores on a principal component that captured the shared variance among reading, spelling, and vocabulary were associated with both stronger inhibition from TL word primes and stronger facilitation from neighbor nonword primes. These findings are consistent with the lexical quality hypothesis of reading that predicts that skilled readers vary in the extent to which they have developed precisely specified orthographic representations.     

Lexical inhibition and sublexical facilitation are surprisingly long lasting

When a listener hears a word (beef), current theories of spoken word recognition posit the activation of both lexical (beef) and sublexical (/b/, /i/, /f/) representations. No lexical representation can be settled on for an unfamiliar utterance (peef). The authors examined the perception of nonwords (peef) as a function of words or nonwords heard 10-20 min earlier. In lexical decision, nonword recognition responses were delayed if a similar word had been heard earlier. In contrast, nonword processing was facilitated by the earlier presentation of a similar nonword (baff-paff). This pattern was observed for both word-initial (beef-peef), and word-final (job-jop) deviation. With the word-in-noise task, real word primes (beef) increased real word intrusions for the target nonword (peef), but only consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) intrusions were increased with similar pseudoword primes (baff-paff). The results across tasks and experiments support both a lexical neighborhood view of activation and sublexical representations based on chunks larger than individual phonemes (CV or VC sequences).     

Masked inhibitory priming in english: evidence for lexical inhibition

Predictions derived from the interactive activation (IA) model were tested in 3 experiments using the masked priming technique in the lexical decision task. Experiment 1 showed a strong effect of prime lexicality: Classifications of target words were facilitated by orthographically related nonword primes (relative to unrelated nonword primes) but were inhibited by orthographically related word primes (relative to unrelated word primes). Experiment 2 confirmed IA's prediction that inhibitory priming effects are greater when the prime and target share a neighbor. Experiment 3 showed a minimal effect of target word neighborhood size (N) on inhibitory priming but a trend toward greater inhibition when nonword foils were high-N than when they were low-N. Simulations of 3 different versions of the IA model showed that the best fit to the data is produced when lexical inhibition is selective and when masking leads to reset of letter activities.     

Form-priming effects in nonword naming

Form-priming effects from sublexical (syllabic or segmental) primes in masked priming can be accounted for in two ways. One is the sublexical pre-activation view according to which segments are pre-activated by the prime, and at the time the form-related target is to be produced, retrieval/assembly of those pre-activated segments is faster compared to an unrelated situation. However, it has also been argued that form-priming effects from sublexical primes might be due to lexical pre-activation. When the sublexical prime is presented, it activates all form-related words (i.e., cohorts) in the lexicon, necessarily including the form-related target, which-as a consequence-is produced faster than in the unrelated case. Note, however, that this lexical pre-activation account makes previous pre-lexical activation of segments necessary. This study reports a nonword naming experiment to investigate whether or not sublexical pre-activation is involved in masked form priming with sublexical primes. The results demonstrated a priming effect suggesting a nonlexical effect. However, this does not exclude an additional lexical component in form priming.     

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.     

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.     

Lexical and sublexical knowledge influences the encoding,storage, and articulation of nonwords

Nonword repetition (NWR) has been used extensively in the study of child language. Although lexical and sublexical knowledge is known to influence NWR performance, there has been little examination of the NWR processes (e.g., encoding, storage, and articulation) that may be affected by lexical and sublexical knowledge. We administered two- and three-syllable spoken nonword recognition and nonword repetition tests on two independent groups of 31 children (mean age = 5 years 7 months). Spoken nonword recognition primarily involves encoding and storage, whereas NWR involves an additional articulation process. The influence of lexical and sublexical knowledge was determined by examining the number of lexical errors produced. There was clear involvement of long-term lexical and sublexical knowledge in both spoken nonword recognition and NWR. In spoken nonword recognition, twice as many errors involved selecting a foil that contained a lexical item (e.g., ‘yashukup’) as involved selecting a foil that contained only nonsense syllables (e.g., ‘yashunup’). In repetition, over 30% of errors changed a nonsense syllable to a lexical item. Our results show that long-term lexical and sublexical knowledge is pervasive in NWR. Any explanation of NWR performance must therefore consider the influence of lexical and sublexical knowledge throughout the whole repetition process, from the encoding to the articulation of nonwords.     

Prelexical facilitation and lexical interference in auditory word recognition.

Phonological priming effects were examined in an auditory single-word shadowing task. In 6 experiments, target items were preceded by auditorily or visually presented, phonologically similar, word or nonword primes. Results revealed facilitation in response time when a target was preceded by a word or nonword prime having the same initial phoneme when the prime was auditorily presented but not when it was visually presented. Second, modality-independent interference was observed when the phonological overlap between the prime and target increased from 1 to 3 phonemes for word primes but not for nonword primes. Taken together, these studies suggest that phonological information facilitates word recognition as a result of excitation at a prelexical level and increases response time as a result of competition at a lexical level. These processes are best characterized by connectionist models of word recognition.     

Individual differences in orthographic priming relate to phonological decoding skill in adults

We examined relationships between individual differences in orthographic priming and a battery of measures assessing orthographic processing ability, reading history, current reading ability, and verbal intelligence in university students. Pronounceable and unpronounceable nonword primes preceded word and nonword targets. Individual differences in nonword reading skill and other measures of reading and spelling ability were associated with the degree of orthographic priming. Individuals with less phonological decoding skill benefited more from anagram primes for word targets preceded by unpronounceable primes and nonword targets preceded by pronounceable primes. Analyses of extreme groups revealed that the group with the lowest phonemic decoding efficiency scores showed a general benefit of orthographic relatedness, while the group with the highest phonemic decoding efficiency scores showed a benefit only under certain conditions. Thus, individuals with worse nonword reading skills may have less precise orthographic representations and therefore benefit more from overlapping coarse-grained orthographic information, regardless of the pronounceability of the prime or the lexical status of the target. These findings demonstrate that university students vary in their orthographic processing skill and the degree to which orthographic information is used during word recognition.     

Does<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">LGHT</Emphasis> prime<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">DARK</Emphasis>? Masked associative priming with addition neighbors

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g.,lght-DARK via the addition neighborlight), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative priming effect, this would clearly indicate that this nonword was activating the lexical/semantic representations of its base word, thereby reinforcing the models of visual-word recognition in which the orthographic representations produced bylght (orligt) andlight are quite similar (e.g., SOLAR, SERIOL, open-bigram, and overlap models). The results showed that the magnitude of the masked associative priming effect with subset primes was remarkably similar to that of the priming effect with the corresponding word prime. Furthermore, the magnitude of the associative priming effect was similar when the deleted letter was a vowel and when the deleted letter was a consonant.     

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.     

Lexical and sublexical processes in the perception of transposed-letter anagrams

Evidence from priming and lexical decision tasks suggests that nonwords created by transposing adjacent letter pairs (TL nonwords) are very effective in activating lexical representations of their base words, because the process of orthographic matching tolerates minor changes in letter position. However, this account disregards the possible role of sublexical processing in reading. TL nonwords are perceptually ambiguous, with lexical and sublexical processing giving rise to conflicting interpretations. The consequences of this ambiguity were investigated in a lexical decision experiment with primes that were either high or low bigram frequency TL versions of target words. Priming effects were much larger for low BF primes (e.g., pucnh-PUNCH) than for high BF primes (e.g., panit-PAINT). This finding is interpreted as evidence that lexical activation can be inhibited by competing output resulting from sublexical processing of TL letter string. We conclude that phonological processing is an important determinant of responses to TL stimuli, and we consider how this interpretation might be accommodated within the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of word recognition.     

Phonological, Semantic, and Mediated Priming in Aphasia

An auditory lexical decision task was conducted to examine rhyme, semantic, and mediated priming in nonfluent and fluent aphasic patients and normal controls. Overall, monosyllabic word targets were responded to faster when preceded by rhyming word and nonword primes than unrelated primes. Similarly, semantically related primes facilitated lexical decisions to word targets. No evidence of mediated priming emerged. Results for individual subjects suggest differences in patterns across the subject groups. Implications of the findings for the integrity of lexical access in aphasic patients are considered.     

Phonological processing and lexical access in aphasia

This study explored the relationship between on-line processing of phonological information and lexical access in aphasic patients. A lexical decision paradigm was used in which subjects were presented auditorily with pairs of words or word-like stimuli and were asked to make a lexical decision about the second stimulus in the pair. The initial phonemes of the first word primes, which were semantically related to the real word targets, were systematically changed by one or more than one phonetic feature, e.g., cat-dog, gat-dog, wat-dog. Each of these priming conditions was compared to an unrelated word baseline condition, e.g., nurse-dog. Previous work with normals showed that even a nonword stimulus receives a lexical interpretation if it shares a sufficient number of phonetic features with an actual word in the listener's lexicon. Results indicated a monotonically decreasing degree of facilitation as a function of phonological distortion. In contrast, fluent aphasics showed priming in all phonological distortion conditions relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nonfluent aphasics showed priming only in the undistorted, related word condition relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nevertheless, in a secondary task requiring patients to make a lexical decision on the nonword primes presented singly, all aphasics showed phonological feature sensitivity. These results suggest deficits for aphasic patients in the various processes contributing to lexical access, rather than impairments at the level of lexical organization or phonological organization.     

Does jugde activate COURT? Transposed-letter similarity effects in masked associative priming

Transposed-letter (TL) nonwords (e.g., jugde) can be easily misperceived as words, a fact that is somewhat inconsistent with the letter-position-coding schemes employed by most current models of visual word recognition. To examine this issue further, we conducted four masked semantic/associative priming experiments, using a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the related primes could be words, TL-internal nonwords, or replacement-letter (RL) nonwords (e.g., judge, jugde, or judpe, respectively; the target would be COURT). Relative to an unrelated condition, masked TL-internal primes produced a significant semantic/associative priming effect, an effect that was only slightly smaller than the priming effect for word primes. No effect, however, was observed for RL-nonword primes. In Experiment 2, the TL-nonword primes were created by switching the two final letters of the primes (e.g., judeg). The results again showed a semantic/associative priming effect for word primes, but not for TL-final nonword primes or for RL-nonword primes. Experiment 3 replicated the associative/semantic priming effect for TL-internal nonword primes, with, again, no effect for TL-final nonword primes. Finally, Experiment 4 again failed to yield a priming effect for TL-final nonword primes. The implications of these results for the choice of a letter-position-coding scheme in visual word recognition models are discussed.     

The role of assembled phonology in reading comprehension

The contribution of assembled phonology to phonological effects in reading comprehension was assessed. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the acceptability of sentences with regular, exception, and nonword homophone substitutions and orthographic controls. Significantly more errors occurred to sentences with regular-word homophones than to exception words, and error rates for nonword homophones were low and not significant. Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to differences in the sentence frames. In Experiment 3, the subjects judged as unacceptable those sentences containing an exception word that sounded correct when read according to spelling-to-sound rules. Significantly higher error rates occurred only for low-frequency exception words. Experiment 4 showed that task conditions affect semantic-categorization error rates for nonword homophones. These results indicate that both assembled and addressed phonology contribute to sentence and word comprehension, but the low error rate for nonwords suggests that an early lexical check may be applied.     

Looks aren’t Everything: Pseudohomophones Prime Words but Nonwords do not

After examining literature that deals with phonological and orthographic effects associated with pseudohomophones, the current effort deviates from the norm by using fewer pseudohomophones (20) and extending the lags between primes and targets (M=8). Word and pseudohomophone primes were found to facilitate lexical decision response latencies to word targets. Response latencies to word targets were not influenced by nonword primes, however. The presence of pseudohomophone effects was demonstrated by longer response latencies and higher error rates for pseudohomophones (e.g., DREEM) that were equated in orthography to nonword controls (e.g., DROAM). Despite the frequency effect observed for base words, the pseudohomophones did not exhibit an effect of base word frequency. The results suggest that phonological codes exert an influence on lexical representation but are not frequency sensitive.     

Lexical and sublexical processes in the perception of transposed-letter anagrams

Evidence from priming and lexical decision tasks suggests that nonwords created by transposing adjacent letter pairs (TL nonwords) are very effective in activating lexical representations of their base words, because the process of orthographic matching tolerates minor changes in letter position. However, this account disregards the possible role of sublexical processing in reading. TL nonwords are perceptually ambiguous, with lexical and sublexical processing giving rise to conflicting interpretations. The consequences of this ambiguity were investigated in a lexical decision experiment with primes that were either high or low bigram frequency TL versions of target words. Priming effects were much larger for low BF primes (e.g., pucnh–PUNCH) than for high BF primes (e.g., panit–PAINT). This finding is interpreted as evidence that lexical activation can be inhibited by competing output resulting from sublexical processing of TL letter string. We conclude that phonological processing is an important determinant of responses to TL stimuli, and we consider how this interpretation might be accommodated within the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of word recognition.     

Examining the interactivity of lexical orthographic and phonological processing.

The number and type of connections involving different levels of orthographic and phonological representations differentiate between several models of spoken and visual word recognition. At the sublexical level of processing, Borowsky, Owen, and Fonos (1999) demonstrated evidence for direct processing connections from grapheme representations to phoneme representations (i.e., a sensitivity effect) over and above any bias effects, but not in the reverse direction. Neural network models of visual word recognition implement an orthography to phonology processing route that involves the same connections for processing sublexical and lexical information, and thus a similar pattern of cross-modal effects for lexical stimuli are expected by models that implement this single type of connection (i.e., orthographic lexical processing should directly affect phonological lexical processing, but not in the reverse direction). Furthermore, several models of spoken word perception predict that there should be no direct connections between orthographic representations and phonological representations, regardless of whether the connections are sublexical or lexical. The present experiments examined these predictions by measuring the influence of a cross-modal word context on word target discrimination. The results provide constraints on the types of connections that can exist between orthographic lexical representations and phonological lexical representations.