Masked phonological priming effects in English - Center for Reading ...
Masked phonological priming effects in English - Center for Reading ...
Masked phonological priming effects in English - Center for Reading ...
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K. Rastle, M. Brysbaert / Cognitive Psychology 53 (2006) 97–145 111It is possible that this stimulus arrangement created the conditions <strong>for</strong> particularly rapid‘‘YES’’ responses, which may have had noth<strong>in</strong>g to do with the <strong>phonological</strong> overlapbetween primes and targets. Rather, any <strong>in</strong><strong>for</strong>mation accessible to participants thatdist<strong>in</strong>guished pseudohomophone primes from other primes <strong>in</strong> these experiments—<strong>for</strong>example, the total activation that these primes produce <strong>in</strong> the <strong>phonological</strong> lexicon (cf.Gra<strong>in</strong>ger & Jacobs, 1996)—could have cued a rapid ‘‘YES’’ response, and thus theappearance of a <strong>phonological</strong> <strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong> effect. This possibility is not unreasonable,especially given the body of research demonstrat<strong>in</strong>g response congruity <strong>effects</strong> <strong>for</strong>sublim<strong>in</strong>ally presented primes (e.g., Dehaene et al., 1998; Forster, 2004; Reynvoet,Caessens, & Brysbaert, 2002).This problem with the exist<strong>in</strong>g lexical decision data is very important to us, because weprefer that task to the others <strong>for</strong> several reasons. For one, we consider the lexical decisiontask to be the most appropriate with which to exam<strong>in</strong>e weak <strong>phonological</strong> theories of visualword recognition implemented as computational models. For example, whereas theDRC model has implemented procedures <strong>for</strong> carry<strong>in</strong>g out visual lexical decision, neitherperceptual identification nor gaze duration has been considered. Even apart from theDRC model, though, we prefer the <strong>for</strong>ward-masked visual lexical decision task to theother tasks <strong>for</strong> both theoretical and empirical reasons. Show<strong>in</strong>g a <strong>phonological</strong> <strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong>effect <strong>in</strong> read<strong>in</strong>g aloud, <strong>for</strong> example, is theoretically less <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g than <strong>in</strong> lexical decision,because there is no disagreement between weak and strong <strong>phonological</strong> theories that a<strong>phonological</strong> representation must be computed prior to the read<strong>in</strong>g aloud response. Similarly,show<strong>in</strong>g the effect <strong>in</strong> <strong>for</strong>ward or backward masked perceptual identification may beempirically less <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g than <strong>in</strong> lexical decision, because we do not know to what extentthese tasks <strong>in</strong>volve off-l<strong>in</strong>e guess<strong>in</strong>g (see e.g., Brysbaert & Praet, 1992; and Perry & Ziegler,2002 <strong>for</strong> evidence that masked perceptual identification may be subject to undesirable<strong>effects</strong> of guess<strong>in</strong>g). F<strong>in</strong>ally, the eye-movement data deviate from the other f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs,because the effect seems to be particularly robust with high-frequency word primes(Lee et al., 1999a).3.2. What makes an adequate graphemic control?Phonological primes typically overlap their targets on both <strong>phonological</strong> and orthographicdimensions (e.g., kake–CAKE). The <strong>in</strong>fluence of <strong>phonological</strong> overlap alone isthere<strong>for</strong>e obta<strong>in</strong>ed by compar<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>phonological</strong> <strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong> condition to a graphemic control<strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong> condition (e.g., pake–CAKE), the logic be<strong>in</strong>g that any additional <strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong>observed <strong>in</strong> the <strong>phonological</strong> <strong>prim<strong>in</strong>g</strong> condition must be due to <strong>phonological</strong> overlapalone. This logic h<strong>in</strong>ges on the requirement that <strong>phonological</strong> primes and graphemic controlprimes share equivalent orthographic similarity with their targets. If targets are moreorthographically similar to their <strong>phonological</strong> primes than to their graphemic controlprimes, then any benefit yielded by the <strong>phonological</strong> primes can be ascribed to the orthographicsimilarity between primes and targets <strong>in</strong>stead of their <strong>phonological</strong> similarity.Conversely, if targets are more orthographically similar to their graphemic control primesthan to their <strong>phonological</strong> primes, then any additional benefit yielded by <strong>phonological</strong>overlap may be hidden.How, then, might we ensure that graphemic controls and <strong>phonological</strong> primes haveequivalent orthographic similarity to targets? The vast majority of articles that we surveyedreported construct<strong>in</strong>g graphemic controls such that they preserved the number of