title: Are coffee and toffee served in a cup? Ortho-phonologically mediated associative priming.
abstract: We report three masked associative priming experiments with the lexical decision task that explore whether the initial activation flow of a visually presented word activates the semantic representations of that word's orthographic/phonological neighbours. The predictions of cascades and serial/modular models of lexical processing differ widely in this respect. Using a masked priming paradigm (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA = 50 ms), words preceded by ortho-phonologically mediated associated "neighbours" (oveja-MIEL, the Spanish for sheep-HONEY; note that oveja is a phonological neighbour of abeja, the Spanish for bee) were recognized more rapidly than words preceded by an unrelated word prime (Experiments 1 and 3). Furthermore, the magnitude of the ortho-phonologically mediated priming effect (oveja-MIEL) was similar to the magnitude of the associative priming effect (abeja-MIEL). With visible primes and a 250-ms SOA, only the directly associated words showed a priming effect (Experiment 2). These findings pose some problems for a modular account and are more easily interpreted in terms of cascaded models.
authors.affiliation: Facultad de Psicología, Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. jaduna@ull.es
authors.forename: Jon Andoni
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Duñabeitia
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics