Reading aloud in Persian: ERP evidence for an early locus of the masked onset priming effect

Abstract

The current study investigates reading aloud words in Persian, a language that does not mark all its vowels in the script. Behaviorally, a masked onset priming effect (MOPE) was revealed for transparent words, with faster speech onset latencies in the phoneme-matching condition (i.e. phonological prime and target onset overlap; e.g. سال /sɒːl/; ‘year’ – صوت /sot/; ‘voice’) than the phoneme-mismatching condition (e.g. تاب /tɒːb/ ‘swing’ – صوت /sot/; ‘voice’). For opaque target words (e.g. صلح /solh/; ‘peace’), no such effect was found. However, event-related potentials (ERPs) did reveal an amplitude difference between the two prime conditions in the 80–160ms time window for transparent as well as opaque words. Only for the former, this effect continued into the 300–480ms time window. This finding constrains the time course of the MOPE and suggests the simultaneous activation of both the non-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme and the lexical route in the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model.