Reduction in alphabet priming with delay and degradation.
Phonologically ambiguous Serbo-Croatian words are named more slowly than their phonologically unique partners. This difference is reduced by nonword primes containing consonants unique to one or the other alphabet. In 2 experiments we investigated the hypothesis that alphabet priming is the inhibition of unique and ambiguous letter units of one alphabet by the unique letter units of the other alphabet. In Experiment 1, ambiguous and unique words followed alphabet-specific nonwords at lags between 100 ms and 1,550 ms. The ambiguous-unique difference increased from 1 ms to 45 ms, consistent with a relaxing inhibitory process. In Experiment 2 we compared priming of ambiguous words with and without visual noise. Priming was less for noisy than for intact stimuli, as would be expected if noise slows processing and if the inhibition responsible for priming weakens further during the additional processing time.
Lukatela
G
G
Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, New Haven.
Lukatela
K
K
Carello
C
C
Turvey
M T
MT
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D014825:Vocabulary; D015022:Yugoslavia