Phonology by itself: Masked phonological priming effects with and without orthographic overlap

Abstract

The activation of the phonological code plays a central role in visual word recognition. However, it is still unclear how this activation is integrated within this mainly bottom-up process. In the present masked priming study we combined Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes to investigate this issue. Greek-Spanish bilinguals performed lexical decisions on Greek and Spanish targets, briefly preceded by either phonologically related or orthographically and phonologically related prime words of the nontarget language. Results revealed significant bidirectional cross-script masked phonological priming effects which disappeared under the influence of nearly overlapping orthographic representations. This pattern of effects suggests that there is fast and automatic language nonselective activation of the phonological code during the initial stages of visual word recognition but that this is clearly dependent on the orthographic properties of the input stimulus. The implications of our findings are discussed within the framework of current models of monolingual and bilingual visual word recognition.