[Masked orthographic priming in the recognition of written words: empirical data and theoretical prospects]

The present paper reviews the main studies that have been conducted on the effects of masked orthographic priming in written word recognition. Empirical data accumulated over the last two decades are exposed by considering three factors that play a role in the effects of orthographic priming: prime lexicality, prime duration, and target and/or prime orthographic neighbourhood. The theoretical implications of these data are discussed in light of the two major frameworks of visual word recognition, the serial search and the interactive activation. As a whole, the interactive activation hypothesis seems to be more appropriate to account for the empirical data.