On the role of the upper part of words in lexical access: Evidence with masked priming

Abstract

More than 100 years ago, Huey (1908/1968) indicated that the upper part of words was more relevant for perception than the lower part. Here we examined whether mutilated words, in their upper/lower portions (e.g., ), can automatically access their word units in the mental lexicon. To that end, we conducted four masked repetition priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Results showed that mutilated primes produced a sizeable masked repetition priming effect. Furthermore, the magnitude of the masked repetition priming effect was greater when the upper part of the primes was preserved than when the lower portion was preserved—this was the case not only when the mutilated words were presented in lower case but also when the mutilated words were presented in upper case. Taken together, these findings suggest that the front-end of computational models of visual-word recognition should be modified to provide a more realistic account at the level of letter features.

Keywords:

• Masked priming
• Orthographic encoding
• Lexical decision

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this article has been partially supported by Grant PSI2008-04069/PSIC and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2008-00048 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and by Grant PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. We thank Rita Pureza and Sofia Frade for their help preparing/running the experiments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes

¹ To view a colour version of this word, please see the online issue of the Journal.

² It may be interesting to note that a recent experiment in Chinese revealed that the removal of beginning strokes in a character is more disruptive to normal reading than the removal of ending strokes (see Yan et al., in press). That is, similar to what occurs in the Latin script with the lower/upper half of the words, not all strokes within a character in Chinese are equally important.