Is the masked priming same-different task a pure measure of prelexical processing?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Visual word recognition models aim to isolate prelexical processes.
• The masked priming same-different task is used to study abstract letter identity processing.
• A consistent lexicality effect (word advantage) challenges the task's ability to measure purely prelexical processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the origin of the word advantage in visual word recognition.
• To determine if the lexicality effect arises from abstract letter processing or lexical activation.
• To clarify the role of orthographic representations in word recognition.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Used conventional visual stimuli in a masked priming same-different task.
• Experiment 2: Employed novel auditory stimuli to constrain nonword matching to the sublexical level.
• Analyzed priming effects for words and nonwords under different conditions.

Main Results:

• Previous explanations like strategy or representation strength were ruled out.
• A word advantage persisted even when controlling for stimulus presentation modality.
• Auditory nonword stimuli abolished scrambled priming for nonwords, but not words, suggesting lexical involvement.
• Shared bigram overlap between primes and targets explained scrambled priming effects.

Conclusions:

• The word advantage in this task is attributed to the activation of whole-word, lexical representations.
• The masked priming task, as commonly used, does not solely measure prelexical abstract letter processing.
• Findings impact theories of orthographic processing and the interpretation of masked priming studies.