Automatic phonological priming in visual word recognition

Abstract

reported by Hillinger (1980, Experiment 3). He used a priming technique in which subjects made a lexical decision about visual prime-and target-letter strings. In a test that assessed whether phonological information is automatically accessed, performance when targets were primed by phonologically similar but graphemically different words (e.g., EIGHT-MATE) was compared with performance when primes were neutral (e.g., ******-MATE). Hillinger found that, relative to the neutral-prime baseline, lexical decisions were facilitated by phonological priming. This indicates that phonological information from the prime affected target recognition. There are at least two ways in which such a facilitatory priming effect could occur. One is by the prime automatically activating representations common to both stimuli. The other is by subjects using phonological information from the prime to anticipate the target (Posner, 1978; Posner & Snyder, 1975). Such an anticipatory strategy would lead to incorrect expectations when primes and targets are unrelated, precipitating an inhibition effect relative to the neutral condition (Mclean & Shulman, 1978; Neely, 1977). Since, in Hillinger's (1980) study, no inhibition effect was found when primes and targets were phonologically unrelated (e.g., VEIL-MATE), it appears that subjects did not anticipate targets from the phonological properties of primes.

Pseudohomophone effects provide evidence of early lexico‐phonological processing in visual word recognition

“…Indeed, Humphreys and Evett (1982) suggested that phonological priming effects result from feedback from the lexical level. They found that identification accuracy was better for targets that were presented after phonologically related primes (e.g., SHOOT -CHUTE), compared to prime target pairs that were only orthographically related (e.g., SHOOT -SHORT) or unrelated pairs (e.g., SHOOT -TRAIN).…”

A study of masked form priming in picture and word naming

“…Geoffrey Loftus, Mark Reinitz, and an anonymous reviewer provided constructive criticism of an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to L. Ferrand, Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris, France. repetition (or identity) priming when a prime word is masked and unavailable for conscious report in tasks such as lexical decision (Forster & Davis, 1984;Segui & Grainger, 1990a, 1990bSereno, 1991), speedednaming (Forster & Davis, 1991;Sereno, 1991), and perceptual identification (Evett & Humphreys, 1981;Humphreys, Besner, & Quinlan, 1988;Humphreys, Evett, & Taylor, 1982).…”

Visual and Phonological Codes in Letter and Word Recognition: Evidence from Incremental Priming

“…In word recognition, a large amount of evidence indicates that phonological information plays an early and automatic role in the recognition of printed words (e.g., Lukatela & Turvey, 1994;Perfetti & Bell, 1991;Perfetti, Bell, & Delaney, 1988;Peter & Turvey, 1994;Rayner, Sereno, Lesch, & Pollatsek, 1995;Ziegler & Jacobs, 1995;Ziegler, Van Orden, & Jacobs, 1997; for a review, see . Some of this evidence comes from priming studies in which phonological overlap between a prime and a target facilitates recognition of the target (e.g., Ferrand & Grainger, 1992, 1993Humphreys, Evett, & Taylor, 1982;Lukatela, Frost, & Turvey, 1998). Moreover, studies that manipulated prime duration point to the possibility that orthographic and phonological processes follow different time course with orthographic information being accessed slightly faster than phonological information (e.g., Ferrand & Grainger, 1993; see also Perfetti & Tan, 1998).…”