Masked Priming Paradigm Research Articles

The Effect of Task Demands on Semantic Negative Compatibility Effect

Negative Compatibility Effect(NCE) is the surprising result that masked prime arrows inhibit the responses to compatibility arrow targets and facilitate the responses to the opposite direction arrow targets at the prime-target Interstimulus Interval of around 100 ms in the masked prime paradigm. NCE has been hotly investigated in terms of its subconsciousness and being counterintuitive. But whether NCE can be observed with semantic stimuli is still unknown. Traditionally, it is believed that subliminal information processing is automatic and is not down-regulated by top-down cognitive control process. However, recent studies challenged this conventional view. As a kind of subliminal perception effect, whether NCE is affected by top-down cognition control is still unknown. The present study combined masked-prime paradigm and Go/No-go paradigm to examine whether there was semantic NCE and whether task demands modulated semantic NCE. Eighteen subjects participated in the study. All stimuli were black against white background presented in the center of the screen. In masked-prime paradigm, Primes were Chinese character "左"(Left) or "右"(Right), targets were character or double arrows in go condition, either compatibility or incompatibility to the prime. Participants were instructed to judge the direction of the arrow or the character by pressing the one of left and right arrow keys. There were no responses to no-go trials. Reaction times were entered into 2(compatibility) × 2(task demand) analyses of variance(ANOVA). The results showed that, the main effect of compatibility and task demand were both significant; the interaction between compatibility and task demand was also significant. Further analysis demonstrated that NCE was significant only in the condition when the prime was related to task demands; there was no significant effect when the prime was not related to task demands. The behavioral data supported the existence of semantic NCE, but it was only observed when the prime was related to task demands. ERP waveform analysis revealed that P3 latency is longer only when prime was related to the task demand in Go trials. In No-go trials, N2 mean amplitude has significant difference between two character primes conditions in the related condition; P3 mean amplitude showed a significant difference between the related and unrelated conditions. The results suggest that P3 latency is an effective component to measure semantic NCE, especially in the Go trials. The findings indicated the existence of semantic NCE. In addition, task demands influenced semantic NCE through top-down cognitive control process.

Do masked orthographic neighbor primes facilitate or inhibit the processing of Kanji compound words?

In the masked priming paradigm, when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue-BLUR), lexical decision latencies are slower than when the same word is primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care-BLUR). This inhibitory neighbor priming effect (e.g., Davis & Lupker, 2006; Segui & Grainger, 1990) is taken as evidence for the lexical competition process that is an important component of localist activation-based models of visual word recognition (Davis, 2003; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). The present research looked for evidence of an inhibitory neighbor priming effect using words written in Japanese Kanji, a logographic, nonalphabetic script. In 4 experiments (Experiments 1A, 1B, 3A, and 3B), inhibitory neighbor priming effects were observed for low-frequency targets primed by higher frequency Kanji word neighbors ([symbol in text]). In contrast, there was a significant facilitation effect when targets were primed by Kanji nonword neighbors ([symbols in text]; Experiments 2 and 3). Significant facilitation was also observed when targets were primed by single constituent Kanji characters ([symbols in text]; Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that lexical competition plays a role in the recognition of Kanji words, just as it does for words in alphabetic languages. However, in Kanji, and likely in other logographic languages, the effect of lexical competition appears to be counteracted by facilitory morphological priming due to the repetition of a morphological unit in the prime and target (i.e., in Kanji, each character represents a morpheme).

How time and semantic relatedness modulate whether and how unconscious information is represented in the brain

Event Abstract Back to Event How time and semantic relatedness modulate whether and how unconscious information is represented in the brain Charlotte Muscarella1, Bart Aben1, Karolien Smets2, Gethin Hughes3 and Eva Van Den Bussche1* 1 Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Psychology, Belgium 2 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium 3 University of Essex, United Kingdom Activity of brain areas can be modulated by several behavioral manipulations. In the current study we used a typical masked priming paradigm to investigate whether time (as defined by the Stimulus Onset Asynchrony or SOA) and the degree of semantic relatedness between prime and target modulate the neural activity triggered by unconscious logos of well-known brands. This allows us to further explore the supposed short-livedness of unconscious representations and the potential of these representations to trigger a wider-spread semantic network. In a lexical decision task participants decided whether targets were words (which could also be brand names) or non-words. These targets were preceded by unconscious prime logos of highly familiar brands. During this behavioral task EEG was recorded. To assess the influence of time, a short (300ms) and long (2500ms) SOA condition was created. To assess the influence of semantic relatedness, related prime-target pairs could either be strongly semantically related (e.g., logo of McDonald’s followed by the target word MCDONALD’S) or semantically related to a lesser degree (e.g., logo of McDonald’s followed by the target word HAMBURGER) Behavioral results indicated that, even after the long SOA, unconscious brand logos facilitated categorization of strongly related targets and, albeit to a lesser extent, more weakly related targets. A modulation of the N400, a negative ERP deflection over the centro-parietal scalp thought to reflect semantic processing, was observed. This N400 modulation was moderated both by SOA and the semantic relatedness between prime and target. This implies that unconscious brand logos can be semantically processed, that this processing is not necessarily short-lived, and that it is moderated by the degree of semantic closeness between prime and target. Keywords: Consciousness, priming, N400, Semantic Processing, brands, logos, unconscious processing Conference: Belgian Brain Council 2014 MODULATING THE BRAIN: FACTS, FICTION, FUTURE, Ghent, Belgium, 4 Oct - 4 Oct, 2014. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Basic Neuroscience Citation: Muscarella C, Aben B, Smets K, Hughes G and Van Den Bussche E (2014). How time and semantic relatedness modulate whether and how unconscious information is represented in the brain. Conference Abstract: Belgian Brain Council 2014 MODULATING THE BRAIN: FACTS, FICTION, FUTURE. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2014.214.00059 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 01 Jul 2014; Published Online: 13 Jul 2014. * Correspondence: Prof. Eva Van Den Bussche, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Psychology, Brussels, 1050, Belgium, eva.vandenbussche@kuleuven.be Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Charlotte Muscarella Bart Aben Karolien Smets Gethin Hughes Eva Van Den Bussche Google Charlotte Muscarella Bart Aben Karolien Smets Gethin Hughes Eva Van Den Bussche Google Scholar Charlotte Muscarella Bart Aben Karolien Smets Gethin Hughes Eva Van Den Bussche PubMed Charlotte Muscarella Bart Aben Karolien Smets Gethin Hughes Eva Van Den Bussche Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

The Interaction of Semantic and Syntactic Information in Chinese–English Bilinguals’ Early Recognition of Polysemous Words

Polysemy is an important linguistic phenomenon, and it appears widely in every language. The main issue of polysemy research includes whether there is semantic ambiguity advantage and its’ influencing factors. Studies of polysemy in bilingual research are few in number and are contradictory about polysemy recognition. This study, based on out-of-context condition, discussed the proficient Chinese-English bilinguals’ recognition process and relative factors using masked priming paradigm. Two experiments were involved: The influence of the dominant and non-dominant translation equivalence, syntactic category information and relatedness of translation equivalence were investigated in Experiment 1 with word decision task and English ambiguous words. The experimental procedure was classical masked priming procedure. Subjects were told to decide whether the word was true or not. All the participants were tested individually on computers. Reaction times for correct responses and error rates were analyzed by subject and item variance. Results showed a significant masked priming effect and semantic relatedness effect in English polysemous word recognition. Furthermore, when words were presented with their dominant translation, the recognition process was faster than when words were presented with their non -dominant translation. Experiment 2 was exactly the same with experiment1, except for the material. The aim of experiment 2 was to discuss how the above-mentioned factors influenced the Chinese ambiguous words. Surprisingly, the results were also similar with experiment1 despite the huge difference between Chinese and English ambiguous words. That is to say, We had observed the effect of dominance of translations and semantic relatedness of multiple translations. Responses were faster when the two translations of a word were related in meaning than when the two translations of a word were unrelated in meaning. It is well known that the distributed conceptual feature model has been proposed for bilingual memory. Our findings could also be explained in the light of this model with activated semantic nods. When it is dominant translation or two translations that are semantically related, it can increase the semantic overlap between target word and its translation equivalence. The difference between this research and previous study was that the syntactic information was activated in early stage of word recognition. We think this is due to the difference of experiments paradigm which reflected different process stage. Based on this research, the authors expand the Distributed Conceptual Feature Model to syntactic level.

The effect of age of L2 acquisition on the organization of the bilingual lexicon: Evidence from masked priming

This study investigates the role of age of acquisition (AoA) on the bilingual mental lexicon. Four groups of participants were tested: (i) English native speakers with minimal exposure to French; (ii) late English–French bilinguals; (iii) early English–French bilinguals; and (iv) simultaneous English–French bilinguals. We used a masked priming paradigm to investigate early, automatic lexical processing at the semantic level by testing both a within-language semantic condition and a cross-language translation condition. AoA was investigated both through group effects and a correlation analysis. We found significant translation priming effects for the simultaneous and early bilinguals only, and a significant correlation between AoA and translation priming effects. Due to the matched L2 proficiency of the early and late bilinguals, these results support our hypothesis that an early AoA, regardless of L2 proficiency, is crucial in order to find the L2-to-L1 priming effects that have often been elusive in recent studies.

Limited role of phonology in reading Chinese two-character compounds: Evidence from an ERP study

This study investigates the role of phonology in reading logographic Chinese. Specifically, whether phonological information is obligatorily activated in reading Chinese two-character compounds was examined using the masked-priming paradigm with event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Twenty-two native Cantonese Chinese speakers participated in a lexical decision experiment. The targets were visually presented Chinese two-character strings and the participants were asked to judge whether the target in each trial was a legitimate compound word in Chinese. Each target was preceded by a briefly presented word prime. The prime and target shared an identical constituent character in the Character-related condition, a syllable in the Syllable-related condition, were semantically related in the Semantic-related condition, and were unrelated (both phonologically and semantically) in the control condition. The prime–target relationship was manipulated to probe the effects of word-form (i.e., character- or syllable-relatedness) and word-semantic relatedness on phonological (as indexed by an N250 ERP component) and semantic (as indexed by an N400 ERP component) processing. Significant and comparable facilitation effects in reaction time, relative to the control, were observed in the Character-related and the Semantic-related conditions. Furthermore, a significant reduction in ERP amplitudes (N250), relative to the control, was obtained in the Character-related condition in the time window of 150–250ms post target. In addition, attenuation in ERP amplitudes was found in the Semantic-related condition in the window of 250–500ms (N400). However, no significant results (neither behavioral nor ERP) were found in the Syllable-related condition. These results suggest that phonological activation is not mandatory and the role of phonology is minimal at best in reading Chinese two-character compounds.

The Multiple Pronunciations of Japanese Kanji: A Masked Priming Investigation

English words with an inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or with more than one pronunciation ("homographic heterophones"; e.g., "lead"-/lεd/, /lid/) are read aloud more slowly than matched controls, presumably due to competition processes. In Japanese kanji, the majority of the characters have multiple readings for the same orthographic unit: the native Japanese reading (KUN) and the derived Chinese reading (ON). This leads to the question of whether reading these characters also shows processing costs. Studies examining this issue have provided mixed evidence. The current study addressed the question of whether processing of these kanji characters leads to the simultaneous activation of their KUN and ON reading, This was measured in a direct way in a masked priming paradigm. In addition, we assessed whether the relative frequencies of the KUN and ON pronunciations ("dominance ratio", measured in compound words) affect the amount of priming. The results of two experiments showed that: (a) a single kanji, presented as a masked prime, facilitates the reading of the (katakana transcriptions of) their KUN and ON pronunciations; however, (b) this was most consistently found when the dominance ratio was around 50% (no strong dominance towards either pronunciation) and when the dominance was towards the ON reading (high-ON group). When the dominance was towards the KUN reading (high-KUN group), no significant priming for the ON reading was observed. Implications for models of kanji processing are discussed.

A Broader View of Perirhinal Function: From Recognition Memory to Fluency-Based Decisions

Although it is well established that the perirhinal cortex (PRC) makes an important contribution to recognition memory, the specific nature of this contribution remains uncertain. The finding that PRC activity is reduced for old compared with new items is typically attributed to the recovery of a long-term memory (LTM) signal. However, because old items are processed more easily or fluently than new items, reduced PRC activity could reflect increased fluency rather than LTM retrieval per se. We tested this hypothesis in humans using fMRI and a well-validated method to manipulate fluency: the masked priming paradigm. Some words during an old-new recognition test were preceded by conceptually related words (primes) that were subliminally presented (masked). The behavioral results replicated previous findings using this paradigm, whereby the fluency manipulation increased "oldness" responses to both old and new items. The fMRI analyses yielded two main sets of results. First, in the case of new items, which are independent from LTM retrieval, masked priming reduced PRC activity and predicted behavioral misattribution of fluency to oldness. Second, in the case of old items, the same PRC region showing fluency-related reductions for new items also contributed to "old" responding to old items. Individual differences in PRC attenuation also predicted oldness ratings to old items, and fluency modulated PRC connectivity with other brain regions associated with processing oldness signals, including visual cortex and right lateral prefrontal cortex. These results support a broader view in which the PRC serves a function more general than memory.

P 48. Supplementary motor area plays a causal role in automatic inhibition of motor response

Negative compatibility effect (NCE) is a phenomenon that reflects automatic self-inhibition of a motor response. NCE is tested by the masked prime paradigm where participants have to respond to right or left oriented arrowhead (“target”) as fast as possible, which is preceded by a “prime” that has the same shape and the same (“compatible” task) or reversed (“incompatible” task) direction as the target, and a “mask” preventing overt perception of the prime. Under certain durations of masking, reaction time (RT) for the incompatible task is shorter than that for the compatible task. This counter-intuitive RT difference is called NCE, and its mechanism has been proposed to lie in the self-inhibition of an automatic response to the masked prime. A lesion study indicated that the supplementary motor area (SMA) is involved in NCE. To elucidate the causal role of SMA in NCE using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in a healthy population. NCE was tested using the masked prime paradigm described above. In this study, participants responded to the target by clicking the right or left mouse button with their right or left index finger. According to previous reports, a mask duration of 150 ms was used to test NCE. In contrast, when the mask has a shorter duration such as 50 ms, the compatible task has shorter reaction time, called positive CE (PCE). NCE, PCE, and choice reaction time (CRT) was measured before and after quadripulse stimulation (QPS)-5 ms, a newly devised rTMS protocol which produces long-term potentiation (LTP) like aftereffect. QPS over SMA, QPS over the primary motor cortex (M1), and sham QPS were compared. In addition, amplitude of motor evoked potential (MEP) from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscles, resting and active motor thresholds (RMT and AMT) were measured as a physiological parameter. QPS over SMA diminished NCE of both hands, whereas QPS over M1 and sham QPS had no effect. CRT was similar among the QPS protocols, but PCE with the right hand tended to be enhanced by QPS over SMA. With regard to the physiological markers, MEP amplitude of right FDI tended to be increased by QPS. RMT and AMT were unchanged in any conditions. The present results indicate that SMA plays a causal role to express NCE. The mechanism of PCE enhancement and its relation to NCE decrease needs to be studied in a future research.

P 146. Motor resonance requires conscious perception but is modulated by unseen actions

Evidence for automatic mirror-like activation of the motor cortex (motor resonance) during observation of others’ actions has been found by several studies. Motor resonance has also been found during observation of implied actions, i.e. static pictures depicting ongoing actions. Here we explored whether motor resonance with implied actions requires the perceptual awareness of the observer or is also triggered in conditions of reduced awareness. In order to test our hypothesis, we analyzed motor response to consciously and unconsciously perceived implied actions using a masked priming paradigm. We presented a sequence of 3 static stimuli depicting right hands: sample, masked prime and target stimulus. While the sample stimuli were always static hands, both prime and target stimuli could display a static hand, an index finger or a little finger abduction. The prime stimuli were presented for 53 ms and were forward and backward masked by a rotating masking stimulus, a procedure that allowed a relatively long lasting presentation of the prime while at the same time disrupting conscious perception: indeed, 17 out of 22 subjects reported they did not see the prime when the experimenter revealed the actual presentation structure after the experiment. A transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulse was delivered over the motor cortex 133 ms (early) or 307 ms (late) after the onset of the probe. Electromyography was used to record TMS motor evoked potentials (MEPs) from the muscles that corresponded to the driving muscle of the observed implied actions, first digital interosseus (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM). Analysis of the MEPs recorded in the 17 subjects reporting unawareness of the prime replicated the finding of a mirror-like increase in corticospinal excitability following observation of consciously perceived target hands (i.e., greater MEP amplitude during observation of the movement involving the recorded muscle as compared to observation of the static hand or of a movement not involving that muscle). Such facilitation was present only in the late TMS delay. Furthermore, no change in corticospinal excitability was found in response to implied action prime, suggesting that masked actions are not sufficient to evoke motor resonance. Importantly, however, we found a significant interaction between prime and target stimuli. In particular, the amplitude of MEPs recorded from a muscle during observation of a target showing the action driven by that muscle was lower when preceded by a prime showing an incongruent action with respect to when it was preceded by a prime showing a congruent action or a still hand. Crucially, no difference was found between MEPs recorded from the muscle during conscious observation of actions driven by that muscle but primed with an unconsciously perceived incongruent action and MEPs recorded during conscious observation of incongruent or neutral movements regardless of the prime. This finding suggests that the masked presentation of a movement that does not involve a certain muscle yields a somatotopic inhibition of the motor resonance in that muscle. Our results provide first time evidence that conscious perception of implied actions is not required for modulation of motor resonance, yet it is required for a direct mirror motor activation. Moreover, they shed additional light on how the cognitive system copes with a crowded social world and the needs for a fast, accurate and dynamic representation of others’ movements.

Unmasking the Mask: Semantic Similarity Produces Disinhibition in a Masked Priming Paradigm

Unmasking the Mask: Semantic Similarity Produces Disinhibition in a Masked Priming Paradigm

Unconscious Priming: Masked Primes Facilitate Change Detection and Change Identification Performance

Change blindness refers to the finding that people have difficulty detecting changes between visual scenes, whenthese scenes are separated by a brief interruption to visual input. The masked priming paradigm was integratedinto a change detection task using real world photos to examine if unconsciously perceived words could assist inthe detection and identification of changes. Results demonstrated superior detection accuracy for deletion andlocation changes compared to addition changes and that change detection response times were shorter fordeletion than either addition or location changes. Identification of deletion and addition changes was better thanfor location changes. Both change detection and identification performances were enhanced by a masked identityprime presented prior to the first scene in the change detection task. These results provide evidence thatunattended information can assist change detection and change identification performance.

Rapid communication: Perceptual strength is different from sensorimotor strength: Evidence from the centre–periphery asymmetry in masked priming

Near-threshold prime stimuli can facilitate or hinder responses to target stimuli, creating either a positive compatibility effect (PCE) or a negative compatibility effect (NCE). An asymmetry has been reported between primes presented in near periphery, which produced a PCE, and foveal primes, which produced an NCE under comparable conditions. This asymmetry has been attributed to the difference in retinal sensitivity, but it remains unclear whether this means that equating discrimination performance for primes in fovea and periphery, in order to account for differences in perceptual sensitivity, would make the priming effects the same. Wider work indicates that perceptual ability can dissociate from visuomotor effects, predicting that equating perceptual ability for fovea and periphery would not equate priming. We tested these opposite possibilities by matching discrimination performance for masked Gabor patches in fovea and near periphery (6°) and using these as primes in a masked priming paradigm expected to elicit NCEs. We found the asymmetry remained: NCE for fovea and PCE for periphery. We replicated this with both blocked and randomized procedures to check for attentional effects. We conclude that equating perceptual strength (discriminability) of stimuli does not equate their sensorimotor impact due to differences in the relative importance of different visual pathways and differing temporal dynamics in perceptual and sensorimotor processes.

Modulation of self-esteem in self- and other-evaluations primed by subliminal and supraliminal faces.

BackgroundPast research examining implicit self-evaluation often manipulated self-processing as task-irrelevant but presented self-related stimuli supraliminally. Even when tested with more indirect methods, such as the masked priming paradigm, participants' responses may still be subject to conscious interference. Our study primed participants with either their own or someone else's face, and adopted a new paradigm to actualize strict face-suppression to examine participants' subliminal self-evaluation. In addition, we investigated how self-esteem modulates one's implicit self-evaluation and validated the role of awareness in creating the discrepancy on past findings between measures of implicit self-evaluation and explicit self-esteem.Methodology/Principal FindingsParticipants' own face or others' faces were subliminally presented with a Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) paradigm in Experiment 1, but supraliminally presented in Experiment 2, followed by a valence judgment task of personality adjectives. Participants also completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in each experiment. Results from Experiment 1 showed a typical bias of self-positivity among participants with higher self-esteem, but only a marginal self-positivity bias and a significant other-positivity bias among those with lower self-esteem. However, self-esteem had no modulating effect in Experiment 2: All participants showed the self-positivity bias.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results provide direct evidence that self-evaluation manifests in different ways as a function of awareness between individuals with different self-views: People high and low in self-esteem may demonstrate different automatic reactions in the subliminal evaluations of the self and others; but the involvement of consciousness with supraliminally presented stimuli may reduce this dissociation.

Event-related brain potentials of masked repetition and semantic priming while listening to sentences

We combined for the first time electrophysiological measures and masked priming technique in sentential context, by setting up a cross-modal masked priming paradigm involving the auditory presentation of sentences. ERPs were time-locked to an auditorily presented word that was preceded by a repeated, related or unrelated pattern masked prime. We registered a two-way N400-difference between unrelated and related/repeated primes, followed by a late positive component (LPC) for repetition priming. Related primes appear to facilitate the lexical-semantic processing of the target to the same extent repeated primes do (equally attenuated N400). Repetition priming exerts additional demands (LPC), possibly related to enhanced recollection or to the construction of a discourse representation. This evidences that the sentential context interacts with masked priming in two vital ways, differing from word list contexts, and paves the way for future studies on the mechanisms of lexical/semantic processes beyond the word level.

Masked Syllable Priming Effects in Word and Picture Naming in Chinese

Four experiments investigated the role of the syllable in Chinese spoken word production. Chen, Chen and Ferrand (2003) reported a syllable priming effect when primes and targets shared the first syllable using a masked priming paradigm in Chinese. Our Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Chen et al.’s (2003) Experiment 3 employing CV (e.g., 拔营,/ba2.ying2/, strike camp) and CVG (e.g., 白首,/bai2.shou3/, white haired) syllable types. Experiment 2 tested the syllable priming effect using different syllable types: e.g., CV (气球,/qi4.qiu2/, balloon) and CVN (蜻蜓,/qing1.ting2/, dragonfly). Experiment 3 investigated this issue further using line drawings of common objects as targets that were preceded either by a CV (e.g., 企,/qi3/, attempt), or a CVN (e.g., 情,/qing2/, affection) prime. Experiment 4 further examined the priming effect by a comparison between CV or CVN priming and an unrelated priming condition using CV-NX (e.g., 迷你,/mi2.ni3/, mini) and CVN-CX (e.g., 民居,/min2.ju1/, dwellings) as target words. These four experiments consistently found that CV targets were named faster when preceded by CV primes than when they were preceded by CVG, CVN or unrelated primes, whereas CVG or CVN targets showed the reverse pattern. These results indicate that the priming effect critically depends on the match between the structure of the prime and that of the first syllable of the target. The effect obtained in this study was consistent across different stimuli and different tasks (word and picture naming), and provides more conclusive and consistent data regarding the role of the syllable in Chinese speech production.

Substituted-letter and transposed-letter effects in a masked priming paradigm with French developing readers and dyslexics

The aim of the study was to undertake a behavioral investigation of the development of automatic orthographic processing during reading acquisition in French. Following Castles and colleagues’ 2007 study (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97, 165–182) and their lexical tuning hypothesis framework, substituted-letter and transposed-letter primes were used in a masked priming paradigm with third graders, fifth graders, adults, and phonological dyslexics matched on reading level with the third graders. No priming effect was found in third graders. In adults, only a transposed-letter priming effect was found; there was no substituted-letter priming effect. Finally, fifth graders and dyslexics showed both substituted-letter and transposed-letter priming effects. Priming effects between the two groups were of the same magnitude after response time (RT) z-score transformation. Taken together, our results show that the pattern of priming effects found by Castles and colleagues in English normal readers emerges later in French normal readers. In other words, language orthographies seem to constrain the tuning of the orthographic system, with an opaque orthography producing faster tuning of orthographic processing than more transparent orthographies because of the high level of reliance on phonological decoding while learning to read.

Is Morpho-orthographic Segmentation Obligatory? Evidence from a New Eye-tracking Masked Priming Paradigm

Is Morpho-orthographic Segmentation Obligatory? Evidence from a New Eye-tracking Masked Priming Paradigm

The interplay of phonology and orthography in visual cognate word recognition: An ERP study

This study examined the role of phonological and orthographic overlap in the recognition of cognate words by recording electrophysiological and behavioral data. One hundred and ninety-two words were selected: 96 cognate words listed according to their phonological and orthographic overlap vs. 96 noncognate words. Twenty-four proficient European Portuguese–English bilinguals performed a silent reading task with a masked priming paradigm. The results showed that phonology interacts with semantic activation at N400 modulations. Phonological priming effects were dependent on the orthographic overlap of cognate words. Thus, the distinctive processing of cognate words seems to be due to their cross-linguistic similarity, which is consistent with a localist connectionist account on cognate representation and processing.

The temporal dynamics of inflected word recognition: A masked ERP priming study of French verbs

Morphological aspects of human language processing have been suggested by some to be reducible to the combination of orthographic and semantic effects, while others propose that morphological structure is represented separately from semantics and orthography and involves distinct neuro-cognitive processing mechanisms. Here we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate semantic, morphological and formal (orthographic) processing conjointly in a masked priming paradigm. We directly compared morphological to both semantic and formal/orthographic priming (shared letters) on verbs. Masked priming was used to reduce strategic effects related to prime perception and to suppress semantic priming effects. The three types of priming led to distinct ERP and behavioral patterns: semantic priming was not found, while formal and morphological priming resulted in diverging ERP patterns. These results are consistent with models of lexical processing that make reference to morphological structure. We discuss how they fit in with the existing literature and how unresolved issues could be addressed in further studies.