Lexical priming from partial-word previews.
Two naming and two lexical decision experiments examined the use of partial-word preview in visual word recognition. Replicating results of an earlier reading study, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed significant benefits from position-specific beginning- and ending-letter previews. Furthermore, benefits from beginning letters were greater for words than for pseudowords. Ending-letter previews showed no corresponding lexical superiority. Experiment 3 revealed that preview of position-specific letters from the beginning plus the ending part of target stimuli, which did not reveal a unique word-beginning letter sequence, facilitated the classification of words but not pseudowords. The results support a two-route model of lexical access in which some partial-word previews afford activation of specific lexical representations, and some partial-word previews afford activation of subword representations.
Inhoff
A W
AW
Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Binghamton 13901.
Tousman
S
S
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014794:Visual Fields