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Updated: Jul 1, 2025

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
Does rotation eliminate masked priming effects for Japanese kanji words?
Masahiro Yoshihara1, Mariko Nakayama2, Xue Junyi3
1Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, 41 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8570, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo 102-0083, Japan.
Abstract:
A key issue in recent visual word recognition literature is whether text rotation disrupts the early stages of orthographic processing. Previous research found no masked repetition priming effect when primes were rotated ≥90° in alphabetic languages. The present study investigated the impact of text rotation using logographic (two-character Japanese kanji) words. In Experiment 1, we conducted a masked repetition priming lexical decision experiment with upright and 180° rotated primes. The rotated primes produced a significant priming effect, although the effect was smaller than the upright primes. In Experiment 2, we further examined the effectiveness of 180° rotated primes in two different conditions: the whole words were rotated vs. each constituent character was rotated at their own positions. Both prime types produced significant priming effects of similar magnitudes. These findings suggest that orthographic processing is more robust against text rotation in logographic languages than in alphabetic languages.
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