Masked priming effects are modulated by expertise in the script

Abstract

In a recent study using a masked priming same–different matching task, Garcı´a-Orza, Perea, and Muñoz (2010) found a transposition priming effect for letter strings, digit strings, and symbol strings, but not for strings of pseudoletters (i.e., EPRI-ERPI produced similar response times to the control pair EDBI-ERPI). They argued that the mechanism responsible for position coding in masked priming is not operative with those “objects” whose identity cannot be attained rapidly. To assess this hypothesis, Experiment 1 examined masked priming effects in Arabic for native speakers of Arabic, whereas participants in Experiments 2 and 3 were lower intermediate learners of Arabic and readers with no knowledge of Arabic, respectively. Results showed a masked priming effect only for readers who are familiar with the Arabic script. Furthermore, transposed-letter priming in native speakers of Arabic only occurred when the order of the root letters was kept intact. In Experiments 3–7, we examined why masked repetition priming is absent for readers who are unfamiliar with the Arabic script. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition.

Keywords:

• Word recognition
• Letter coding
• Masked priming

Acknowledgments

This research has been partially supported by Grants PSI2009–08889/PSIC, PSI2008–04069/PSIC, PSI2008–06107/PSIC, and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2008–00048 from the Spanish Government.

Notes

¹ As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, perhaps native speakers of Arabic developed some sort of a strategy in decoding the transposed-letter words when the relative order of the root letters remained intact. To examine this issue, we compared the magnitude of the priming effects for the different types of “root”/“nonroot” sequences in the experiment. These analyses did not reveal any signs of a constraint, though. Likewise, it could be argued that a variable such as “number of orthographic neighbours” could have modulated the obtained priming effects—note that this factor was controlled across conditions. Post hoc analyses on the latencies of “same” responses did not reveal a significant role of number of neighbours as a predictor of the magnitude of masked transposed-letter priming. Of course, we acknowledge that this null finding must be taken with caution: Most of the words employed in the experiments had few orthographic neighbours.

² We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this possibility.