The impact of text orientation on form priming effects in four-character Chinese words.

Abstract

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster's (2011) abstract letter unit account argues that the mechanism responsible for such effects acts at a totally abstract orthographic level (i.e., the visuospatial orientation is irrelevant to the nature of the relevant orthographic code). The present experiments expanded this debate beyond alphabetic scripts and the syllabic Kana script used by Witzel et al. to a logographic script (Chinese). Experiment 1 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects with primes and targets presented in both the conventional left-to-right horizontal orientation and the vertical top-to-bottom orientation, replicating Witzel et al. Experiment 2 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects even when both the primes and targets were presented in the right-to-left orientation, a rare but existent text orientation in Chinese. In Experiment 3, the primes, but not the targets, were presented in the right-to-left orientation. Priming effects were again obtained regardless of the fact that the primes and targets appeared in different orientations. Experiment 4, which involved primes and targets presented in a completely novel bottom-to-top orientation, also produced a TC priming effect. These results support abstract letter/character unit accounts of form priming effects while failing to support perceptual learning accounts. (PsycINFO Database Record

The impact of consonant–vowel transpositions on masked priming effects in Italian and English

“…We decided to use the generalised linear mixed-effects model and analyse raw RTs rather than the more common practice of using linear mixed-effects models and normalising raw RTs with a reciprocal transformation (e.g., invRT = −1000/RT). The reason is that nonlinear transformations systematically alter the pattern and size of interaction effects, rendering such transformations inappropriate when the research interest lies in interactions, as in the present case (Balota et al, 2013; Cohen-Shikora, Suh, & Bugg, 2018; Yang, Chen, Spinelli, & Lupker, 2019). 1…”

Is letter position coding when reading in L2 affected by the nature of position coding used when bilinguals read in their L1?

“…That is, could there be a single model framework involving a letter position coding process that could produce little, if any, transposed letter priming effects in some languages (e.g., Hebrew, Korean), some transposed letter priming effects in others, as long as the transpositions are not extreme (e.g., English, Spanish), and a backward priming effect in others (e.g., Chinese)? And, further, if such a model framework could do so, could that same system be able to explain how it is possible to observe a 50+ ms backward priming effect in Chinese (suggesting that the system makes little effort to produce accurate position coding), while at the same time explaining the 80-ms identity priming effect reported by Yang et al (2019), an effect showing that there is a clear advantage of having the Chinese characters in the same order in the prime and target. Although building such a system is beyond the scope of the present paper, it may be useful to consider the nature of the orthographic coding models currently available in an attempt to get some idea of whether such a system could be built based on the structure of one of them.…”

“…More recently, Yang and colleagues (Yang et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2020) have provided an examination of extreme transposition priming in Chinese. Those authors demonstrated that, using four-character Chinese words as targets, primes that were the targets written backwards (i.e., using the Roman alphabet to reflect this relationship, it would be "dcba" priming ABCD) produce 50+ ms priming effects, although those effects were still significantly smaller than the identity priming effect that Yang et al (2019) reported (i.e., abcd-ABCD -80 ms).…”

“…Subsequently, Yang et al (2020) demonstrated that these backward priming effects for Chinese readers are neither phonologically nor morphologically based. That is, because a backward prime in Chinese contains all the syllables and all the morphemes of the target (in a backward order), Yang et al (2020) suggested that Yang et al's (2019) backward priming effect might not be entirely orthographically based. The results of their five experiments, however, appeared to rule out any contribution of either phonologically/syllabically or morphologically/meaning-based priming.…”

Phonological priming effects with same-script primes and targets in the masked priming same-different task

“…For instance, developing readers produced significant honse-HOUSE type priming effects for words with large orthographic neighborhoods (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977), whereas skilled adult readers did not (Castles, Davis, & Letcher, 1999). As a second example, transposed-letter nonwords (hosue-HOUSE) produce larger priming effects than substituted-letter nonwords (honae-HOUSE) in many different languages (Perea & Lupker, 2003Yang, Chen, Spinelli, & Lupker, 2019).…”