A number of experiments have revealed that matched-case identity PRIME-TARGET pairs are responded to faster than mismatched-case identity prime-TARGET pairs for pseudowords (e.g., JUDPE-JUDPE < judpe-JUDPE), but not for words (JUDGE-JUDGE = judge-JUDGE). These findings suggest that prime-target integration processes are enhanced when the stimuli tap onto lexical representations, overriding physical differences between the stimuli (e.g., case). To track the time course of this phenomenon, we conducted an event-related potential (ERP) masked-priming lexical decision experiment that manipulated matched versus mismatched case identity in words and pseudowords. The behavioral results replicated previous research. The ERP waves revealed that matched-case identity-priming effects were found at a very early time epoch (N/P150 effects) for words and pseudowords. Importantly, around 200 ms after target onset (N250), these differences disappeared for words but not for pseudowords. These findings suggest that different-case word forms (lower-and uppercase) tap into the same abstract representation, leading to prime-target integration very early in processing. In contrast, different-case pseudoword forms are processed as two different representations. This word-pseudoword dissociation has important implications for neural accounts of visual-word recognition.Keywords Masked priming . ERP correlates . N250 . Visual-word recognition Despite the variability in physical appearance of a written word (e.g., house, HOUSE, house), skilled readers are able to access the appropriate lexical entry in a few hundreds of milliseconds. When and how the stimulus features are coded in an abstract manner are the main questions in this article. These are not trivial issues, since this process of abstraction might take place at an individual-letter level, at a graphemic level, at a whole-word level, or even at a semantic level. To make matters even more complex, feedforward and feedback connections might also exist among the levels.There is some consensus among researchers that a word's constituent letters are coded in an abstract form that is independent of its physical features (see Bowers, 2000, andThompson, 2009, for reviews). Although initially the wordprocessing system is sensitive to differences in the visual features of stimuli, these differences are quickly diffused by mapping these features onto unique orthographic abstract representations (see Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, &Vinckier, 2005, andGrainger, Rey, &Dufau, 2008, for neurally motivated accounts of this phenomenon). The assumption that abstract representations are rapidly accessible during visualword recognition has come mainly from previous experimental evidence using the masked-priming technique (Forster & Davis, 1984; see Grainger, 2008, for a review; see Dehaene et al
A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task ('is it a brand name?'): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the single-presentation experiment revealed faster identification times of brand names in their standard case configuration than in their non-standard case configuration (i.e., adidas faster than ADIDAS; IKEA faster than ikea). In the masked priming experiment, we found faster identification times of brand names when they were preceded by an identity prime that matched its standard case configuration than when it did not (i.e., faster response times to adidas-adidas than to ADIDAS-adidas). Taken together, the present findings strongly suggest that letter-case information forms part of a brand name's graphemic information, thus posing some limits to current models of visual-word recognition.
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