Transliteration and transcription effects in biscriptal readers: the case of Greeklish

In order to overcome limitations associated with script incompatibilities Greek users of the Internet have developed Greeklish, a transliterated version of Modern Greek using Roman characters. The representational status of this artificial writing system was examined in two masked priming lexical decision experiments using Greeklish primes with different degrees of graphemic overlap with their corresponding Greek targets. Results suggested that Greeklish primes were effectively processed and transliterated to their Greek counterparts. Larger masked priming effects were found as a function of increased prime-target graphemic overlap. Interestingly, these Greeklish priming effects were in all cases of smaller magnitude than the pure Greek identity priming effect. Our findings revealed that extensive experience with a recently developed artificial writing system leads to its non-effortful processing, but that even for highly experienced Greeklish users the Greeklish-to-Greek conversion is modulated by the graphemic properties of the input stimulus.