Masked Priming Research Articles

Masked Translation Priming With Concreteness of Cross-Script Cognates in Visual Word Recognition by Chinese Learners of English: An ERP Study.

Translation equivalents for cognates in different script systems share the same meaning and phonological similarity but are different orthographically. Event-related potentials were recorded during the visual recognition of cross-script cognates and non-cognates together with concreteness factors while Chinese learners of English performed a lexical decision task with the masked translation priming paradigm in Experiment 1 (forward translation: L1–L2) and Experiment 2 (backward translation: L2–L1). N400 effect was found to be closely related to priming effects of cross-script cognate status and concreteness in Experiment 1; and in Experiment 2, N150 and N400 effects were related to priming effects of cross-script cognate status and concreteness, and greater priming effects of cross-script cognate status in cognates than in non-cognates for abstract words were found in the time window of 100–200 ms. Meanwhile, the asymmetry of translation directions was observed in smaller priming effects in forward translation than in backward translation in the time window of 100–200 ms for abstract cognates, and in larger priming effects in forward translation than in backward translation in the time window of 350–550 ms for each type of words. We discussed the roles of phonological activation and concreteness effects in view of the function of N150 and N400 components as well as the relevant models, mainly the Distributed Feature Model and Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model.

The inflectional morphology representation of individual words in the mental lexicon

Models of complex word recognition can be separated into two wide groups: symbolic and connectionist. Symbolic models presume the existence of an explicit morphological representation of individual words; connectionist models do not and consider morphological effects to be a by-product of interaction between phonological, orthographic and semantic information. This study aimed to test whether there are explicit mental representations of inflected lexical units in the mental lexicon. Accordingly, the method of inflected suffix morphological and semantic priming of nouns in the Serbian language was used. In the morphological priming condition, the prime and the target shared the same inflectional suffix. In Experiment 1 overt priming was used, while in Experiment 2, masked priming. The results showed no significant effects of inflected suffix morphological priming, while significant semantic priming effects were recorded. The results obtained in this research are in line with predictions of the connectionist models.

Morphophonological activation in Chinese word recognition

Abstract The role of morphophonology during Chinese visual word recognition was investigated in three masked priming lexical decision experiments. The primes and targets were Cantonese Chinese bimorphemic words. In Chinese, most characters correspond to morphemes, but sometimes the mapping between character and morpheme is not one-to-one. Specifically, some characters are heteronymic, which had one visual form associated with multiple pronunciations and meanings (e.g., “長” is pronounced as /coeng4/ and /zoeng2/ in Cantonese, which means “long” and “senior”, respectively). In Experiment 1, facilitative priming was found when the primes and targets shared heteronymic characters of identical (e.g., “長遠-long term” /coeng4jyun5/ and “長短-length” /coeng4dyun2/), but not a different, pronunciation (e.g., “長官-senior official” /zoeng2gun1/). Sharing word-level phonology only (e.g., “場景-scene” /coeng4ging2/) had no effects. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, and further indicated that the effects could not be attributed to sharing word-level meanings (e.g., “即時-immediate” /zik1si4/). Experiment 3 compared the priming effects produced by the two alternative pronunciations of the heteronymic characters. The results showed that the strength of priming was statistically comparable in the two pronunciation-congruent conditions. Together, this study provided evidence that morphophonology was activated to facilitate the ambiguity resolution of heteronymic characters. The lemma model was modified to accommodate the results.

What are the letters e and é in a language with vowel reduction? The case of Catalan

AbstractAlthough the Latin-based orthographies of most Western languages employ vowels with accent marks (e.g., é vs. e), extant models of letter and word recognition are agnostic as to whether these accented letters and their non-accented counterparts are represented by common or separate abstract units. Recent research in French with a masked priming alphabetic decision task was interpreted as favoring the idea that accented and non-accented vowels are represented by separate abstract orthographic units (orthographic account: é↛e and e↛é; Chetail & Boursain, 2019). However, a more parsimonious explanation is that salient (accented) vowels are less perceptually similar to non-salient (non-accented) vowels than vice versa (perceptual account: e→é, but é↛e; Perea et al., 2021a; Tversky, 1977). To adjudicate between the two accounts, we conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment in Catalan, a language with a complex orthography-to-phonology mapping for non-accented vowels (e.g., e→/e/, /ə/, /ε/). Results showed faster responses in the identity than in the visually similar condition for accented targets (é–É < e–É), but not for non-accented targets (e–E = é–E). Neither of the above accounts can fully capture this pattern. We propose an explanation based on the rapid activation of both orthographic and phonological codes.

Cross-script phonological activation in Chinese-English bilinguals: The effect of SOA from masked priming.

The issue of bilingual phonological access remains unclear for bilinguals with cross-script language systems, which is especially true when the time course of phonological activation is involved. To investigate the time course of cross-script phonological activation, the present study asked Chinese-English bilinguals to complete a word naming task that was conducted in a forward-masked phonological priming paradigm in three stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. By comparing the interlingual and intralingual phonological priming effects in a within-subjects design, we found that (a) target naming in Chinese and English was facilitated by a phonologically similar English or Chinese prime in the three SOA conditions (43 ms, 75 ms, and 150 ms) and the facilitation effect of the prime reached the peak when the pronunciation of the prime-target pair most resembled each other and (b) manipulation of the SOAs affected both the naming latencies of target words and the sizes of the phonological priming effect. In particular, naming latencies in each prime-target type displayed an increasing tendency as the SOA prolonged. Moreover, despite the varied sizes of the priming effect in the three SOA conditions, we found a consistent pattern that the priming effects in two interlingual conditions resembled their respective intralingual conditions along the time course. Taken together, these findings provide strong support for an integrated phonological representation of bilinguals and further extend the language nonselective access hypothesis to language pairs with very different orthographic systems. Implications for the manipulation of the SOAs in the masked priming paradigm are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Asymmetric Morphological Priming Among Inflected and Derived Verbs and Nouns in Greek.

The present study examined differences between inflectional and derivational morphology using Greek nouns and verbs with masked priming (with both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony) and long-lag priming. A lexical decision task to inflected noun and verb targets was used to test whether their processing is differentially facilitated by prior presentation of their stem in words of the same grammatical class (inflectional morphology) or of a different grammatical class (derivational morphology). Differences in semantics, syntactic information, and morphological complexity between inflected and derived word pairs (both nouns and verbs) were minimized by unusually tight control of stimuli as permitted by Greek morphology. Results showed that morphological relations affected processing of morphologically complex Greek words (nouns and verbs) across prime durations (50–250ms) as well as when items intervened between primes and targets. In two of the four experiments (Experiments 1 and 3), inflectionally related primes produced significantly greater effects than derivationally related primes suggesting differences in processing inflectional versus derivational morphological relations, which may disappear when processing is less dependent on semantic effects (Experiment 4). Priming effects differed for verb vs. noun targets with long SOA priming (Experiment 3), consistent with processing differences between complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs) when semantic effects are maximized. Taken together, results demonstrate that inflectional and derivational relations differentially affect processing complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs). This finding indicates that distinctions of morphological relation (inflectional vs. derivational) are not of the same kind as distinctions of grammatical class (nouns vs. verbs). Asymmetric differences among inflected and derived verbs and nouns seem to depend on semantic effects and/or processing demands modulating priming effects very early in lexical processing of morphologically complex written words, consistent with models of lexical processing positing early access to morphological structure and early influence of semantics.

Letter chunk frequency does not explain morphological masked priming

Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g., lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence. To this aim, we assessed masked priming as induced by nonword primes obtained by combining a stem (e.g., bulb) with (i) naturally frequent, derivational suffixes (e.g., -ment), (ii) non-morphological, equally frequent word-endings (e.g., -idge), and (iii) non-morphological, infrequent word-endings (e.g., -kle). In two additional tasks, we collected interpretability and word-likeness measures for morphologically-structured nonwords, to assess whether priming is modulated by such factors. Results indicate that masked priming is not affected by either the frequency or the morphological status of word-endings, a pattern that was replicated in a second experiment including also lexical primes. Our findings are in line with models of early visual processing based on automatic stem/word extraction, and rule out letter chunk frequency as a main player in the early stages of visual word identification. Nonword interpretability and word-likeness do not affect this pattern.

Morphological Processing in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Visual Masked Priming Study

AbstractThis study examined the processing of derivational morphology and its association with early phonological skills of 24 Dutch‐speaking children with dyslexia and 46 controls matched for age. A masked priming experiment was conducted where the semantic overlap between morphologically related pairs was manipulated as part of a lexical decision task. Results suggest that morphological processing is intact in children with dyslexia when compared to age‐matched controls. Significant priming effects were found in each group. Children with dyslexia were found to solely benefit from the morpho‐semantic information, while the morpho‐orthographic form the properties of morphemes‐influenced controls. Due to the longitudinal nature of the data set, an examination of early phonological awareness’s role in the later development of morphological processing skills was possible. In line with the psycholinguistic grain‐size theory, fifth‐grade morphological processing in children with dyslexia was found to be negatively correlated to earlier second‐grade PA skills. A similar relation was not found among the controls. Results indicate a potential shift in the cognitive processes involved during reading to compensate for the observed phonological deficits of children with dyslexia.

Unveiling the boost in the sandwich priming technique.

The masked priming technique (which compares #####-house-HOUSE vs. #####-fight-HOUSE) is the gold-standard tool to examine the initial moments of word processing. Lupker and Davis showed that adding a pre-prime identical to the target produced greater priming effects in the sandwich technique (which compares #####-HOUSE-house-HOUSE vs #####-HOUSE-fight-HOUSE). While there is consensus that the sandwich technique magnifies the size of priming effects relative to the standard procedure, the mechanisms underlying this boost are not well understood (i.e., does it reflect quantitative or qualitative changes?). To fully characterise the sandwich technique, we compared the sandwich and standard techniques by examining the response times (RTs) and their distributional features (delta plots; conditional-accuracy functions), comparing identity versus unrelated primes. The results showed that the locus of the boost in the sandwich technique was two-fold: faster responses in the identity condition (via a shift in the RT distributions) and slower responses in the unrelated condition. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings.

Can Masked Emotion-Laden Words Prime Emotion-Label Words? An ERP Test on the Mediated Account.

The present event-related potential (ERP) study explored whether masked emotion-laden words could facilitate the processing of both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in a valence judgment task. The results revealed that emotion-laden words as primes failed to influence target emotion-label word processing, whereas emotion-laden words facilitated target emotion-laden words in the congruent condition. Specifically, decreased late positivity complex (LPC) was elicited by emotion-laden words primed by emotion-laden words of the same valence than those primed by emotion-laden words of different valence. Nevertheless, no difference was observed for emotion-label words as targets. These findings supported the mediated account that claimed emotion-laden words engendered emotion via the mediation of emotion-label words and hypothesized that emotion-laden words could not prime emotion-label words in the masked priming paradigm. Moreover, this study provided additional evidence showing the distinction between emotion-laden words and emotion-label words.

Phonological encoding in Vietnamese: An experimental investigation.

In English, Dutch, and other Germanic languages the initial phonological unit used in word production has been shown to be the phoneme; conversely, others have revealed that in Chinese this is the atonal syllable and in Japanese the mora. The current paper is, to our knowledge, the first to report chronometric data on Vietnamese phonological encoding. Vietnamese, a tonal language, is of interest as, despite its Austroasiatic roots, it has clear similarities with Chinese through extended contact over a prolonged period. Four experiments (i.e., masked priming, phonological Stroop, picture naming with written distractors, picture naming with auditory distractors) have been conducted to investigate Vietnamese phonological encoding. Results show that in all four experiments both onset effects as well as whole syllable effects emerge. This indicates that the fundamental phonological encoding unit during Vietnamese language production is the phoneme despite its apparent similarities to Chinese. This result might have emerged due to tone assignment being a qualitatively different process in Vietnamese compared to Chinese.

MODULATION EFFECT OF MOTOR ACTIVITY ON LIMBIC AREAS: AN FMRI STUDY

Neural activation of the motor cortex has been consistently reported to be evoked in the emotion processing of facial expressions, but it is poorly understood whether and how the motor system influences the activity of limbic areas during participants’ perceived emotional expressions. In this study, we proposed that motor activations evoked by emotional processing influence the activations in limbic areas such as amygdala during the perception of facial expressions. To examine this issue, a masked priming paradigm was adopted in our fMRI experiment, which could modulate the activation within the motor cortex when healthy participants perceived sad or happy facial expressions. We found that the first presented stimulus (masked prime) in each trial reduced the activations in the premotor cortex and inferior frontal gyrus when the movement of facial muscles implied by the arrows on the prime stimulus was consistent with that implied by the target face expressions (compatible condition), but increased the activations in these two areas when the movements implied by the arrows and the target face expressions were inconsistent (incompatible condition). The superior temporal gyrus, middle cingulate gyrus and amygdala also showed similar response tendency to that in motor cortex. Moreover, psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis showed that both right middle cingulate gyrus and bilateral superior temporal gyrus were closely linked to the premotor cortex with inferior frontal gyrus during the incompatible trials compared with the compatible trials. Together with this result and the significant activation correlations between the motor cortex and the limbic areas, this work revealed the modulation effect of motor cortex on brain regions related to emotion perception, suggesting that motor representation of facial movements can affect emotion experience. Our results provide new evidence for the functional role of motor system in the perception of facial emotions, and could contribute to the understanding of the deficit in social interaction for patients with autism or schizophrenia.

How are words with diacritical vowels represented in the mental lexicon? Evidence from Spanish and German

ABSTRACT Recent research has shown that the omission of diacritics in words does not affect the initial contact with the lexical entries, as measured by masked priming. In the present study, we directly examined whether diacritics’ omission slows down lexical access using a single-presentation semantic categorisation task (“is the word an animal name?”). We did so in a language in which diacritics reflect lexical stress but not vowel quality (Spanish; e.g. ratón [mouse] vs. raton; Experiment 1) and in a language in which diacritics reflect vowel quality but not lexical stress (German; e.g. Kröte vs. Krote; Experiment 2). In Spanish, word response times were similar for words with diacritics that were either present or omitted. In contrast, German words were responded more slowly when the words’ diacritics were omitted. Thus, the function of diacritics in each language determines how words with diacritics are represented in the mental lexicon.

How Processing Fluency Contributes to the Old/New Effects of Familiarity and Recollection: Evidence From the Remember/Know Paradigm

Abstract Previous investigations have demonstrated FN400 and LPC, 2 event-related potential old/new effects that respectively reflect familiarity- and recollection-based processes in memory. However, it is unclear whether these effects are susceptible to processing fluency, particularly different types of processing fluency. To address this issue, applying a masked priming paradigm, we conducted an event-related potential experiment by manipulating semantic relations between the prime and the target as identical (reflecting perceptual fluency), thematically and taxonomically related (referring to conceptual fluency), and unrelated. A remember/know (R/K) judgment task in the test phase was used to distinguish familiarity- and recollection-based processes. Behaviorally, both task performance and response speed were modulated by the variables of priming condition, item type, and response type. All 4 priming conditions elicited significant FN400 and LPC. Compared with the K response, the R response was more relevant to the recollection-based processes reflected by LPC. Both FN400 and LPC were modulated by whether there was a response of R, K, or new. The former was susceptible only to conceptual fluency, and the latter was sensitive to both perceptual fluency and conceptual fluency, which offered telling evidence for the dual process model. Considerations for future investigations are proposed. See supplemental materials here: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ajp/media/evidence_in_remember_know_paradigm/

On the role of syllabic neighbourhood density in the syllable structure effect in European Portuguese

Previous lexical decision masked priming studies have shown that the advantage of syllable-congruent primes over syllable-incongruent primes is observed for CV (e.g., JU.ROS [interests]), but not for CVC first-syllable words (e.g., TUR.BO [turbo]), giving rise to the so-called syllable structure effect (e.g., ju.ral-JU.ROS < jur.ga-JU.ROS; tur.ta-TUR.BO = tu.res-TUR.BO). This effect is puzzling since it is not accounted for either by the distributional frequencies of CV and CVC syllables in European Portuguese (EP) or by syllable complexity. Here we examine whether the number of words of the same syllabic length sharing the same (first) syllable in the same (first) position, a measure taken as an index of syllabic neighbourhood density, may account for the syllable structure effect. To that purpose, 36 EP skilled readers performed a lexical decision masked priming task in which 48 CV and 48 CVC words matched in the number of syllabic neighbours, amongst other variables, were preceded by syllable-congruent (e.g., ju.ral-JU.ROS and tur.ta-TURBO), syllable-incongruent (e.g., jur-ga-JU.ROS and tu.res-TUR.BO), and unrelated primes (e.g., pu.cas- JU.ROS and binva-TURBO). Syllable priming effects were still observed only for CV words, even though CVC words with a CV phonological structure (e.g., EN.TE[comb] - /pˈẽtɨ/) tended to behave similarly to CV words, suggesting that EP syllable effects may be driven by phonological factors.

Disentangling the Role of Deviant Letter Position on Cognate Word Processing.

The way of coding letter position has been extensively assessed during the recognition of native words, leading to the development of a new generation of models that assume more flexible letter position coding schemes compared to classical computational models such as the interactive activation (IA) model. However, determining whether similar letter position encoding mechanisms occur during the bilingual word recognition has been largely less explored despite its implications for the leading model of bilingual word recognition (multilink) as it assumes the input-coding scheme of the IA model. In this study, we aimed to examine this issue through the manipulation of the position of the deviant letter of cognate words (external and internal letters). Two experiments were conducted with Catalan–Spanish bilinguals (a masked priming lexical decision task and a two-alternative forced-choice task) and their respective monolingual controls. The results revealed a differential processing for the first letter in comparison to the other letters as well as modulations as a function of language cue, suggesting amendments to the input-coding scheme of the multilink model.

Phonological precision for word recognition in skilled readers.

According to the lexical quality hypothesis, differences in the orthographic, semantic, and phonological representations of words will affect individual reading performance. While several studies have focused on orthographic precision and semantic coherence, few have considered phonological precision. The present study used a suite of individual difference measures to assess which components of lexical quality contributed to competition resolution in a masked priming experiment. The experiment measured form priming for word and pseudoword targets with dense and sparse neighbourhoods in 84 university students. Individual difference measures of language and cognitive skills were also collected and a principal component analysis was used to group these data into components. The data showed that phonological precision and NHD interacted with form priming. In participants with high phonological precision, the direction of priming for word targets with sparse neighbourhoods was facilitatory, while the direction for those with dense neighbourhoods was inhibitory. In contrast, people with low phonological precision showed the opposite pattern, but the interaction was non-significant. These results suggest that the component of phonological precision is linked to lexical competition for word recognition and that access to the mental lexicon during reading is affected by differing levels of phonological processing.

The lexical status of verbs among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers: a developmental model.

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two priming paradigms: masked priming and the cross-modal immediate repetition task. We conducted two visual lexical decision tasks (Experiment 1 for verb pattern, Experiment 3 for verb roots), and two auditory decision tasks (Experiment 2 for verb pattern, Experiment 4 for verb roots). In the visual tasks, the participants were asked to decide whether a visual stimulus was a real word or not by pressing the laptop keyboard's "yes" or "no" button. The auditory experiments were conducted similarly to the visual experiments, except that the stimuli were auditory, to clarify the locus of the morphological deficit observed in the visual test of the dyslexic students, should there be such failures. Analysis of Experiment 1 showed that verb patterns are not lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among typical and dyslexic readers of different ages. However, Experiment 3 indicated that roots do indeed constitute lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among normal and dyslexic readers of different ages. In Experiment 2, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the word pattern test was stronger among dyslexic and young readers than among more skilled readers, and contributed to speeding up lexical decisions more than its quality, among all research groups. In Experiment 4, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the root test was stronger than the visual effect among all participants, and contributed to hastening lexical decisions and improving the quality of the answers (success percentage). The results showed that roots contribute to the reading process. However, their contribution is different among dyslexic readers. Its construction is slower and different from that of typical readers, whereas word patterns have no lexical representation among the three reader groups that are likely to facilitate lexical decisions. The results are discussed with reference to the latest research literature on morpheme type (root or pattern).

Bilingual lexical representation

Abstract This paper has two aims: (1) to examine evidence for noncognate translation priming from cross-language masked priming studies of printed words. (2) to introduce an automatic procedure for creating masked speech priming experiments. For (1) we conducted two meta-analyses that aggregated evidence from masked translation priming studies in the L1 to L2 and L2 to L1 prime-target directions. These showed that there was evidence of significant priming for both directions, and that priming was larger for the L1-L2 direction. The analyses revealed considerable heterogeneity in outcomes, particularly for priming in the L1 to L2 direction. For (2) we outlined some of the practical difficulties that are involved in implementing a masked speech priming experiment and offered a largely automated solution (that we will make available).1 We then briefly considered whether the work with written primes and targets may translate to the spoken medium.

Morphological preview effects in English are restricted to suffixed words.

Much of the evidence for morphological decomposition accounts of complex word identification has relied on the masked-priming paradigm. However, morphologically complex words are typically encountered in sentence contexts and processing begins before a word is fixated, when it is in the parafovea. To evaluate whether the single word-identification data generalize to natural reading, Experiment 1 investigated the contribution of morphological structure to the very earliest stages of lexical processing indexed by preview effects during sentence reading in the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. Preview conditions systematically assessed the impact of prefixed and suffixed nonword previews that manipulated stem and affix overlap, and affix status, against an orthographically legal control baseline. Initial fixations on suffixed target words showed a preview benefit from nonwords that combined the target stem with a legitimate affix, but not with a nonaffix, whereas prefixed targets only benefited from an identical preview. When presented in a masked prime lexical-decision task in Experiment 2, the same stimuli yielded equivalent stem priming from suffixed and prefixed primes regardless of affix status, consistent with previous masked priming studies using similar nonword primes. The early effects of morphological structure selectively observed on parafoveal processing of suffixed words are inconsistent with recent nonmorphological, position-invariant accounts of embedded stem activation. These results provide the first evidence of morphological parafoveal processing in English and contribute to recent evidence that readers extract a higher level of information from the parafovea during natural reading than was previously assumed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).