Masked priming with orthographic neighbors: An ERP investigation

authors

• Grainger Jonathan
• Massol Stéphanie
• Dufau Stéphane
• Holcomb Phillip

document type

abstract

The masked priming technique was combined with ERP recordings to provide a further investigation of the effects of orthographic neighbors on visual word recognition. Prior work has show inhibitory effects of high-frequency orthographically similar prime words during the recognition of low-frequency target words (e.g., blue–BLUR vs. hand–BLUR) in the lexical decision task, a phenomenon thought to reflect inhibitory processes operating during lexical selection. We therefore predicted that the N250 ERP component, which is thought to reflect sublexical processing during visual word recognition, would show priming effects from orthographic neighbors that resemble repetition priming effects. On the other hand, priming effects on the N400 component should be greatly attenuated or even reversed compared with repetition priming. The results are in line with the predictions.

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