Orthographic and phonological priming effects in the same-different task.

Sachiko Kinoshita,Dennis Norris,Michael Gayed

doi:10.1037/xhp0000548

Abstract

Masked priming tasks have been used widely to study early orthographic processes—the coding of letter position and letter identity. Recently, using masked priming in the same–different task Lupker, Nakayama, and Perea (2015a) reported finding a phonological priming effect with primes presented in Japanese Katakana, and English target words presented in the Roman alphabet, and based on this finding, suggested that previously reported effects in the same–different task in the literature could be based on phonology rather than orthography. In this article, the authors explain why the design of Lupker et al.’s experiment does not address this question; they then report 2 new experiments that do. The results indicate that the priming produced by orthographically similar primes in the same–different task for letter strings presented in the Roman alphabet is almost exclusively orthographic in origin, and phonology makes little contribution. The authors offer an explanation for why phonological priming was observed when the prime and target are presented in different scripts but not when they are presented in the same script.

Highlights

Masked priming tasks have been used widely to study early orthographic processes—the coding of letter position and letter identity
Using masked priming in the same– different task Lupker, Nakayama, and Perea (2015a) reported finding a phonological priming effect with primes presented in Japanese Katakana, and English target words presented in the Roman alphabet, and based on this finding, suggested that previously reported effects in the same– different task in the literature could be based on phonology rather than orthography
The results indicate that the priming produced by orthographically similar primes in the same– different task for letter strings presented in the Roman alphabet is almost exclusively orthographic in origin, and phonology makes little contribution

Summary

Introduction

Masked priming tasks have been used widely to study early orthographic processes—the coding of letter position and letter identity. Public Significance Statement The masked priming same– different task, in which people are asked to decide whether the target (e.g., CULT) preceded by a briefly presented prime (cult) is the same or different from the referent (cult) is used widely to study early orthographic processes with letter and word stimuli. A recent study, using primes written in a different writing system from the referent and target found phonological priming effects and, based on this result, suggested that the masked priming effects from this task could be phonological, rather than orthographic. In visual word recognition research, the past decade has seen much progress in understanding the “front-end”— early orthographic processes involved in the coding of letter identity and letter position.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion