title: Letter position information and printed word perception: the relative-position priming constraint.
abstract: Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the target "apricot"). Priming effects were not influenced by whether or not absolute, length-dependent position was respected (e.g., "a-ric-t" vs. "arict"/"ar-i-ct"). Position of overlap of relative-position primes (e.g., apric-apricot; ricot-apricot; arict-apricot) was found to have little influence on the size of priming effects, particularly in conditions (i.e., 33 ms prime durations) where there was no evidence for phonological priming. The results constrain possible schemes for letter position coding.
authors.affiliation: University of Provence, Marseille, France. grainger@up.univ-mrs.fr
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grainger
authors.forename: Jean-Pierre
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Granier
authors.forename: Fernand
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Farioli
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Van Assche
authors.forename: Walter J B
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: van Heuven
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009949:Orientation; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading