Abstract
To study prelexical processes involved in visual word recognition a task is needed that only operates at the level of abstract letter identities. The masked priming same-different task has been purported to do this, as the same pattern of priming is shown for words and nonwords. However, studies using this task have consistently found a processing advantage for words over nonwords, indicating a lexicality effect. We investigated the locus of this word advantage. Experiment 1 used conventional visually-presented reference stimuli to test previous accounts of the lexicality effect. Results rule out the use of different strategies, or strength of representations, for words and nonwords. No interaction was shown between prime type and word type, but a consistent word advantage was found. Experiment 2 used novel auditorally-presented reference stimuli to restrict nonword matching to the sublexical level. This abolished scrambled priming for nonwords, but not words. Overall this suggests the processing advantage for words over nonwords results from activation of whole-word, lexical representations. Furthermore, the number of shared open-bigrams between primes and targets could account for scrambled priming effects. These results have important implications for models of orthographic processing and studies that have used this task to investigate prelexical processes.
Highlights
In recent years there has been an increased interest in the early orthographic processes involved in visual word recognition, such as the coding of letter positions in words
There was no interaction between String Type and Prime Type, all Fs < 1, response times (RT) were collapsed across String Type
There was no interaction between String and Prime Type, F1(2,31) = 1.81, p = .17, F2(2,154) = 1.72, p = .18, so RTs were collapsed across String Type
Summary
In recent years there has been an increased interest in the early orthographic processes involved in visual word recognition, such as the coding of letter positions in words. Based on evidence from Marmurek [21] and Angiolillo-Bent and Rips [24] and their own studies, Kinoshita and Norris [19] argued that in this version of the task the representations used for processing the reference would be the same for words and nonwords They found no interaction between string type and prime type, in Experiment 4 of their study, illustrating that the pattern of priming is similar for words and nonwords. We tested the hypothesis that strategic effects in processing the reference stimulus result in a word advantage on the masked priming same-different task in Experiment 1d by removing the blocking of trials by string type to reduce between-trials predictability, and by mixing string type across reference-target pairs in the different condition to reduce predictability within-trials
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