Word recognition across orthographies: Another look at the interaction between context and degradation

Abstract

The performance of English and Spanish subjects was examined in two experiments using a lexical decision task in which the effects of semantic priming and stimulus degradation were systematically varied. The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis predicts that priming and degradation will interact in the orthographically “deep” language (English) but not in the “shallow” one (Spanish). In the first experiment, the two factors were found to interact in a similar way in both English and Spanish groups. In the second experiment, in which only Spanish subjects participated, the interaction was again present but only in those subjects who showed an overall facilitation effect on primed words. The results are consistent with the use of the so-called “direct” route in Spanish and are at variance with other previous findings which have suggested that reading in shallow orthographies occurs via the “indirect” phonological route. There was also evidence that nonword rejection times were slower in Spanish subjects and that the performance of the two groups was affected differently by the different types of neutral baseline primes (asterisks or unrelated words). Possible interpretations of these performance variations are briefly discussed.