When facilitation becomes inhibition: effects of modality and lexicality on transposed-phoneme priming

ABSTRACT

We examined the contributions of phoneme-to-word facilitation and word-to-word inhibition to transposed-phoneme priming effects under unimodal and cross-modal presentations. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that the presentation of an auditory prime formed by transposing two phonemes in a given target word facilitated lexical decisions to auditory targets. This facilitation was independent of the lexicality of the primes. In Experiment 2 the targets were presented visually rather than auditorily. We found an inhibitory priming effect, which, in contrast to Experiment 1, was influenced by the lexicality of the primes, with an effect emerging only with word primes. These findings point to a greater impact of phoneme-to-word facilitation under unimodal presentation and a greater role for word-to-word inhibition under cross-modal presentation. Hence, by simply manipulating the modality of target presentation, it is possible to separately probe two central mechanisms postulated in models of spoken word recognition, namely phoneme-to-word activation and lexical competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Unimodal auditory priming
• cross-modal priming
• transposed-phoneme effects
• lexical competition
• phoneme-to-word activation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that Dufour and Grainger (2022) did not observe transposed-phoneme effects with nonwords created by transposing nonadjacent phonemes in multisyllabic words (e.g. /ʃoloka/-/ ʃokola/) in both a primed and unprimed lexical decision task. However, in a different study (Dufour et al., 2021) we reported clear transposed-phoneme effects in an unprimed lexical decision task with nonadjacent transpositions both when the transposed phonemes belonged to a different syllable (/ʃoloka/-/ ʃokola/) and, as in the present study, to the same syllable (/bis.tͻk/-/bis.kͻt/). Post-hoc and correlation analysis in Dufour et al.’s (2021) study revealed that the discrepancy between the two studies for the /ʃoloka/ type of stimuli was due to differences in the overall speed of responding of participants, with the effects becoming greater with slower responses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council: [Grant Number 742141].