Phonological priming in auditory word recognition.

Used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in 3 experiments involving 170 undergraduates. Ss identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Exp I, primes and targets were English words that shared 0, 1, 2, 3, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Exp II, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Exp III, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Reliable phonological priming was observed in all experiments. Results of Exps I and II support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory; however, results of Exp III, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competitor priming in spoken word recognition.

Most models predict that priming a word should retard recognition of another sharing its initial sounds. Available short lag priming data do not clearly support the prediction. The authors report 7 continuous lexical-decision experiments with 288 participants. With lags of 1–5 min between prime and probe, response time increased for a monosyllabic word preceded by a word sharing its onset and vowel (but not one sharing its rime) and for a polysyllabic word preceded by another sharing its first syllable. The effect was limited to words primed by words, suggesting that identifying the prime strengthens its lexical attractor, making identification of a lexical neighbor more difficult. With lags of only a few trials, facilitatory effects of phonological similarity or familiarity bias effects were also seen; this may explain why clear evidence for inhibitory priming has been lacking hitherto. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical and sentence context effects in word recognition.

Three experiments examined lexical and sentence-level contributions to contextual facilitation effects in word recognition. Subjects named target words preceded by normal or scrambled sentence contexts that contained lexical associates of the target. In Experiment 1, normal sentences showed facilitation for related targets and inhibition for unrelated targets. Experiment 2 eliminated syntactically anomalous targets among unrelated items and showed only facilitation for related targets. In neither experiment was there any effect of relatedness for scrambled stimuli. Experiment 3 included syntactically normal but semantically anomalous sentences to test whether the failure of scrambled sentences to show priming was due to their syntactic incoherence. Normal sentences again showed contextual facilitation, but neither scrambled nor anomalous sentences showed such effects. The results indicate that there are sentence-context effects that do not arise solely from intralexical spreading activation and suggest that context facilitates the identification of a lexical candidate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

General slowing in semantic priming and word recognition.

Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (1) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming effect was 1.44 times that of younger (Y) adults, (2) regression lines describing the relations between O and Y adults' latencies in related (O?=?1.54 Y?–?112) and unrelated conditions (O?=?1.50 Y?–?93) were not significantly different, and (3) that there was a proportional relation between O and Y adults' priming effects (O?=?1.48 Y?–?2). Analyses of word-naming studies yielded similar results. Analyses of delayed pronunciation data (D. A. Balota & J. M. Duchek, 1988) revealed that word recognition was 1.47 times slower in O adults, whereas O adults' output processes were only 1.26 times slower. Overall, analyses of whole latencies and durations of component processes provide converging evidence for a general slowing factor of approximately 1.5 for lexical information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The recognition potential and word priming

The effect of priming on the latency of the recognition potential (RP) was tested using rapid stream stimulation. Subjects detected five-letter words in a stream of nonword images. Lifting the right index finger signalled detection of a word. Rapid responses were rewarded and false alarms were penalized. Just before generating an image stream, a computer briefly displayed either the specific target word or or five-letter string that indicated the target was any one of ten previously studied words. Precise target specification was expected to produce more rapid detection than the provision of less definite information. Since the RP was thought to reflect the speed of perception, it was predicted that its latency would be less when the target word was beforehand than when less specific information was provided. The results for 10 subjects confirmed the hypothesis.     

Phonologically mediated priming in spoken and printed word recognition.

Three priming studies investigated the role of phonology in both spoken- and printed-word recognition. Homophone primes (e.g., dough and doe) made ambiguous through auditory presentation (e.g., /do/), produced significant semantic priming effects on target words related to multiple interpretations of the ambiguous prime (e.g., bread and deer). In contrast, homophone primes made unambiguous through visual presentation failed to produce comparable priming effects. For example, the phonologically mediated priming effects from dough to deer and from doe to bread were found to be small relative to the direct semantic priming effects from dough to bread and from doe to deer. These results indicate that phonology does not play the same mediating role during printed-word recognition as it does during spoken-word recognition. Instead, orthography appears to constrain the activation of lexical entries during printed-word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult aging effects on semantic and episodic priming in word recognition.

Two experiments compared automatic semantic and episodic priming effects in adult aging. In the 1st experiment, target words were semantically primed; in the 2nd experiment, targets were primed by repetition of semantically unrelated words. Both experiments involved a pronunciation task with response signals at fixed times following target onset. Consequently, priming was measured as improvement in the percentage of correct responses. Priming was also calculated with speed–accuracy measures of intercept and slope. Both types of priming effect were significant in the percentage correct and slope measures, but no age group differences were found. Furthermore, the magnitudes of the priming effects were equivalent. The age-resistant nature of semantic and episodic priming, as well as evidence for a common theoretical mechanism, is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitation of word recognition by semantic priming in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenic (n?=?21), bipolar (n?=?18), and normal control subjects (n?=?21) were compared on a word recognition measure of semantic priming. The task involved the presentation of related, neutral, and unrelated word pairs; the second word (target word) in each pair was presented in a degraded form. Facilitation was defined as the accuracy of target word recognition for the related word pairs minus accuracy for the neutral word pairs. Titration, achieved by manipulating the degradation of the target word, was used to maintain each subject's overall accuracy for related and neutral items at approximately 50%. This procedure minimized the artifactual effects of overall accuracy on the difference score. Schizophrenics exceeded both normal control subjects and bipolar subjects on facilitation. Bipolar subjects did not differ from control subjects. The results support Maher's hypothesis that semantic priming effects are heightened in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In search of perceptual influences of sentence context on word recognition.

A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. The authors compared effects of legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed contexts on target word performance using the Reicher-Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., "it began to flap/flop") over all other contexts and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., "the cellar is dark/dank") and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., "born to be wild") but not incongruent (e.g., mild) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words are presented in legal sentence contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative priming in word recognition: A context effect.

In 5 experiments using a priming methodology, the role of contextual factors on Ss' performance in a word-recognition task was investigated. Ss read short stories, and then their recognition of words from the stories was tested. Effects of contextual factors on Ss' performance were examined by manipulating the context of the stories' presentation and by designing the experimental materials to weaken the effects of semantic relations between primes and targets, thereby enhancing Ss' opportunity to use contextual relations between the words. The overall results of all 5 experiments indicate that context influences the priming effect of close semantic relations. They can be interpreted as supporting cue-retrieval models of priming mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociative effects of stimulus quality on semantic and morphological contexts in visual word recognition.

Semantic and morphological contexts were manipulated jointly with stimulus quality under conditions where there were few related prime-target pairs (i.e., low relatedness proportion) in a lexical decision experiment. Additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality on RT were observed, replicating previous work. In contrast, morphological context interacted with stimulus quality. This dissociation is discussed in the context of Besner and colleagues' evolving multistage framework. The essence of the account is that 1) stimulus quality affects feature and letter levels, but not later levels, 2) feedback from semantics to the lexical level is inoperative under low relatedness proportion conditions (hence stimulus quality and semantic context yield additive effects), whereas 3) feedback from the lexical level to the letter level is intact, hence stimulus quality and morphological context produce an interaction by virtue of them affecting a common stage of processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from masked phonological priming.

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch–French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first- and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Form-based priming in spoken word recognition: The roles of competition and bias.

Phonological priming of spoken words refers to improved recognition of targets preceded by primes that share at least one of their constituent phonemes (e.g., BULL–BEER). Phonetic priming refers to reduced recognition or targets preceded by primes that share no phonemes with targets but are phonetically similar to targets (e.g., BULL–VEER). Five experiments were conducted to investigate the role of bias in phonological priming. Performance was compared across conditions of phonological and phonetic priming under a variety of procedural manipulations. Ss in phonological priming conditions systematically modified their responses on unrelated priming trials in perceptual identification, and they were slower and more errorful on unrelated trials in lexical decision than were Ss in phonetic priming conditions. Phonetic and phonological priming effects display different time courses and also different interactions with changes in proportion of related priming trials. Phonological priming involves bias; phonetic priming appears to reflect basic properties of activation and competition in spoken word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Masked partial-word priming in visual word recognition: Effects of positional letter frequency.

In 4 primed lexical decision experiments, it was found that the positional frequencies of letters shared by the prime and target relative to the overall positional letter frequency of the target determined the magnitude of priming effects. The lower the positional frequency of shared letters, the stronger the facilitatory effect observed. Both an interactive and noninteractive semistochastic version of the interactive activation model captured the principal trends in the data. It is argued that masked partial-word priming arises from a trade-off between the facilitation generated by prime–target letter overlap and the inhibition generated from all lexical representations activated by letters in the prime that receive further support on target presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When are morphemic and semantic priming observed in visual word recognition?

J. Stolz and D. Besner (1998) reported a dissociation between morphemic and semantic priming in the context of lexical decision. Morphemic priming was observed following letter search on the prime display, but semantic priming was not. The 14 participants in the present experiment identified the color of a single letter in the prime display before making a lexical decision to the target. Both morphemic and semantic priming were observed. These results are discussed in relation to the observation that identifying the color of a single letter of a word in the Stroop task is associated with a reduction in the size of the Stroop effect as compared to when all letters are colored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in the effects of sentence context and stimulus degradation during visual word recognition.

I investigated adult age differences in the efficiency of feature-extraction processes during visual word recognition. Participants were 24 young adults (M age?=?21.0 years) and 24 older adults (M age?=?66.5 years). On each trial, subjects made a word/nonword discrimination (i.e., lexical decision) regarding a target letter-string that was presented as the final item of a sentence context. The target was presented either intact or degraded visually (by the presence of asterisks between adjacent letters). Age differences in lexical decision speed were greater for degraded targets than for intact targets, suggesting an age-related slowing in the extraction of feature-level information. For degraded word targets, however, the amount of performance benefit provided by the sentence context was greater for older adults than for young adults. It thus appears that an age-related deficiency at an early stage of word recognition is accompanied by an increased contribution from semantic context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On priming by a sentence context.

Previous investigations of sentence context effects (SCEs) on word-naming time have uncovered a pattern of facilitation dominance. Another finding has been that words that are more difficult to recognize in isolation display larger SCEs than easier words. The present experiments with 384 undergraduates showed SCEs to be robust and eliminated several alternative explanations. Two experiments demonstrated the appropriateness of the neutral condition used to assess facilitation and inhibition. Another showed that SCEs did not depend on the procedure used. It was shown that manipulations that were designed to affect S strategies did not change the pattern of results. In 3 experiments, an interaction between stimulus quality and content condition was obtained. The interaction replicated across 2 forms of stimulus degradation, but only 1 form increased inhibition effects as well as facilitation effects. Other inconsistencies between previous SC experiments in the magnitude of the inhibition effects observed were resolved by showing that an SC produced more inhibition in the lexical decision task than in the naming task. It was demonstrated that the 2 tasks produced different amounts of inhibition when the same stimuli were used. Sentence integration processes that occurred after lexical access appeared to be responsible for some of the inhibition observed in lexical decision tasks. (85 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of sentence constraint on priming in natural language comprehension.

In 4 cross-modal naming experiments, researchers investigated the role of sentence constraint in natural language comprehension. On the sentence constraint account, incoming linguistic material activates semantic features that in turn pre-activate likely upcoming words. The 1st and 2nd experiments investigated whether stimulus offset asynchrony played a critical role in previous studies supporting the sentence constraint account. The 3rd and 4th experiments examined further predictions of the sentence constraint account, in particular whether pre-activated words would compete for activation. In Experiment 3, the researchers manipulated whether an expected target word had a close competitor and found that response to the expected word was facilitated regardless of the proximity of a competitor. The 4th experiment established that close competitors were primed by the sentence frames and should have been available to compete with expected target words. Thus, word-level representations did not compete for activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perception and preference in short-term word priming.

Responding optimally with unknown sources of evidence (ROUSE) is a theory of short-term priming applied to associative, orthographic-phonemic, and repetition priming. In our studies, perceptual identification is measured with two-alterative forced-choice testing. ROUSE assumes features activated by primes are confused with those activated by the target. A near-optimal decision discounts evidence arising from such shared features. Too little discounting explains the finding that primed words were preferred after passive viewing of primes. Too much discounting explains the findings of reverse preference after active processing of primes. These preference changes highlight the need to use paradigms (like the present ones) capable of separating preferential and perceptual components of priming. Evidence of enhanced perception was found only with associative priming and was very small in magnitude compared with preference effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)