Do priming effects in perceptual identification and word judgment reflect different underlying mechanisms?

We examined priming of orthographically illegal nonwords in a perceptual identification task and a word judgment task in undergraduate participants. In perceptual identification, priming was significant and equivalent after structural or phonological encoding. In word judgment, priming was significant after phonological encoding but not structural encoding. In a follow-up experiment in older control participants and amnesic participants, priming in word judgment was not significant. Older control participants found the stimuli more difficult to pronounce than did undergraduate participants, and word judgment priming in undergaduate participants was significant only for the stimuli that were judged easy to pronounce. These findings demonstrate that priming in perceptual identification and word judgment extends to novel stimuli that are not linked to preexisting lexical or sublexical representations but that priming occurs at different levels in the two tasks: at a featural or orthographic level in perceptual identification and at a phonological level in word judgment.