Automatic and pre-lexical computation of phonology in visual word identification

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the hypothesis that identification of a visually presented word involves phonological information that is activated pre-lexically and automatically. A backward masking paradigm was used in which a word target was followed by a pseudoword mask, followed in turn by a non-linguistic pattern mask. The stimulus materials were Serbo-Croatian. The pseudoword mask could share all but one phoneme in common with the target, or none; moreover, it could be printed in the same alphabet as the target (e.g. both stimuli printed in Cyrillic), or in the other alphabet (e.g. target in Cyrillic, mask in Roman). Word targets were always lower case, and pseudoword masks were always upper case. It was assumed that where a mask shares phonological information with the target it can compensate for the interruption in processing by continuing the activation of the phoneme units activated by the target. Such an effect would be pre-lexical because the phoneme units activated by the mask would be those activated previously during the incomplete processing of the target. Both experiments, using different onset asynchronies among the stimuli, found significantly higher levels of target identification for homophonous masking than for non-homophonous masking, in agreement with similar studies using English materials. It was also shown that alphabet congruity affected the magnitude of the phonological effect in a direction that supported an hypothesis of inhibition of the letter processing units of one alphabet by the unique letters of the other alphabet. The results were discussed in terms of phonology's role in mediating lexical access in Serbo-Croatian and English. and in terms of a network model of visual word identification in Serbo-Croatian.