The time course of orthography and phonology: ERP correlates of masked priming effects in Spanish

Abstract One key issue for computational models of visual-word recognition is the time course of orthographic and phonological information during reading. Previous research, using both behavioral and event related brain potential (ERP) measures, has shown that orthographic codes are activated very early but that phonological activation starts to occur immediately afterward. Here we report an ERP masked priming experiment in Spanish that investigates this issue further by using very strict control conditions. The critical phonological comparison was between two pairs of primes having the same orthographic similarity to the target words but differing in phonological similarity (e.g., conal-CA…

Does conal prime CANAL more than cinal? Masked phonological priming effects in Spanish with the lexical decision task.

Evidence for an early involvement of phonology in word identification usually relies on the comparison between a target word preceded by a homophonic prime and an orthographic control (rait-RATE vs. raut-RATE). This comparison rests on the assumption that the two control primes are equally orthographically similar to the target. Here, we tested for phonological effects with a masked priming paradigm in which orthographic similarity between priming conditions was perfectly controlled at the letter level and in which identification of the prime was virtually at chance for both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (66 and 50 msec). In the key prime-target pairs, each prime differed from the targ…

Neighborhood Effects in Visual Word Recognition and Reading

Short article: Does the brain regularize digits and letters to the same extent?

The cognitive system does not just act as a mirror from the sensory input; instead, it tends to normalize this information. Given that letter processing seems to be much more specialized than digit processing in the cortex, we examined whether the regularization process occurs differently from digits to letters than from letters to digits: We employed a masked priming same/different experiment (e.g., probe, VESZED; prime, V35Z3D; and target, VESZED). When embedded in letter strings, digits that resemble letters (e.g., 3 and 5 in V35Z3D-VESZED) tend to be encoded in a letter-like manner, whereas when embedded in digit strings, letters that resemble digits (e.g., E and S in 9ES7E2–935732) te…