The effect of shared structure and content on reading nonwords: evidence for a CV skeleton

Four experiments examined the effect of shared skeletal structure versus content overlap on naming printed nonwords. Experiments 1-2 compared priming among nonwords sharing either skeletal structure and content (e.g., dus-DUS) or structure alone (e.g., pid-BAF) with controls that differed from the target in the number of skeleton slots (e.g., pid-BAF vs. plid-BAF). Conversely, in Experiments 3-4, same-versus different-structure primes contrasted only in the ordering of CV skeletal slots (e.g., fap-DUS vs. ift-DUS). Priming effects were modulated by shared content and skeletal similarity. The sensitivity of skeletal priming to the abstract arrangement of consonants and vowels suggests that skeletal representations assign distinct slots for consonants and vowels. Readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure in nonword identification indicates that assembled phonological representations are constrained by linguistic knowledge.