The time course of consonant and vowel processing during word recognition

Abstract

In a recent study using a masked priming lexical decision task, New, Araujo, and Nazzi found priming of targets by primes sharing consonants (jalu-JOLI) but not by primes sharing vowels (vobi-JOLI). To examine the orthographic or phonological/lexical nature of this consonantal bias, and to determine whether vocalic priming can be obtained under different presentation conditions, we manipulated the duration of prime presentation. Experiment 1 examined masked priming effects for consonant- or vowel-related primes with 33 ms prime durations, while Experiments 2 and 3 examined masked priming effects with longer prime processing times (66 ms or 50 + 16 ms). Results replicated the relative advantage of consonant over vocalic priming, and established that the consonant bias was not at the orthographic level but rather at the phonological and lexical levels. Furthermore, primes sharing vowels with the target showed inhibition for longer processing times. The implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition are discussed.

Keywords:

• consonants and vowels
• orthographic and phonological processing
• visual word recognition

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Magali Boibieux and Angelica Buerkin for their contribution, the Labex EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics) and ANR-ESRC grant # ANR-09-FRBR-015 to TN.

Notes

1. We first ran 48 subjects (as in Experiment 2 and 3). We found similar results except that the difference between our consonant primes and our vowel primes was nonsignificant by subjects [F1(1, 47) = − 1.3, p=.26] but marginally significant by items [F2(1, 59) = 3.85, p=.051]. In a second time, we added 12 subjects in order to clarify the pattern observed.