Developmental differences in masked form priming are not driven by vocabulary growth

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Skilled readers accurately distinguish visually similar words, indicating precise lexical representations.
• The masked form priming lexical decision task assesses orthographic precision.
• Children show form priming for high N words, unlike adults, suggesting developing precision.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the hypothesis that written vocabulary growth drives orthographic precision.
• To investigate if age or vocabulary size better predicts form priming effects.
• To control for effective orthographic neighborhood size in priming tasks.

Main Methods:

• Equated effective orthographic neighborhood size for children and adults.
• Administered masked form priming lexical decision tasks.
• Analyzed age and vocabulary size as predictors of form priming.

Main Results:

• Form priming differences persisted after controlling for effective neighborhood size.
• Age was a stronger predictor of form priming than vocabulary size.
• Findings did not support the vocabulary growth hypothesis for lexical precision.

Conclusions:

• Written vocabulary growth does not appear to drive the development of precise lexical representations.
• Spelling ability development may be a more critical factor in precise orthographic representation.
• Further research is needed to understand the role of spelling in reading development.