title: Extending models of visual-word recognition to semicursive scripts: Evidence from masked priming in Uyghur.
abstract: One basic feature of the Arabic script is its semicursive style: some letters are connected to the next, but others are not, as in the Uyghur word [see text]/ya xʃi/ ("good"). None of the current orthographic coding schemes in models of visual-word recognition, which were created for the Roman script, assign a differential role to the coding of within letter "chunks" and between letter "chunks" in words in the Arabic script. To examine how letter identity/position is coded at the earliest stages of word processing in the Arabic script, we conducted 2 masked priming lexical decision experiments in Uyghur, an agglutinative Turkic language. The target word was preceded by an identical prime, by a transposed-letter nonword prime (that either kept the ligation pattern or did not), or by a 2-letter replacement nonword prime. Transposed-letter primes were as effective as identity primes when the letter transposition in the prime kept the same ligation pattern as the target word (e.g., [see text]/inta_jin/-/itna_jin/), but not when the transposed-letter prime didn't keep the ligation pattern (e.g., [see text]/so_w_ʁa_t/-/so_ʁw_a_t/). Furthermore, replacement-letter primes were more effective when they kept the ligation pattern of the target word than when they did not (e.g., [see text]/so_d_ʧa_t/-/so_w_ʁa_t/ faster than [see text]/so_ʧd_a_t/-/so_w_ʁa_t/). We examined how input coding schemes could be extended to deal with the intricacies of semicursive scripts.
authors.affiliation: Department of World Languages, Literature and Cultures.
authors.forename: Mahire
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yakup
authors.affiliation: College of Engineering and Computer Science.
authors.forename: Wayit
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Abliz
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics.
authors.forename: Joan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sereno
authors.affiliation: Department of Methodology.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
mesh_terms: D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013334:Students; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary