title: On the nature of consonant/vowel differences in letter position coding: Evidence from developing and adult readers.
abstract: In skilled adult readers, transposed-letter effects (jugde-JUDGE) are greater for consonant than for vowel transpositions. These differences are often attributed to phonological rather than orthographic processing. To examine this issue, we employed a scenario in which phonological involvement varies as a function of reading experience: A masked priming lexical decision task with 50-ms primes in adult and developing readers. Indeed, masked phonological priming at this prime duration has been consistently reported in adults, but not in developing readers (Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998). Thus, if consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding with adults are due to phonological influences, transposed-letter priming should occur for both consonant and vowel transpositions in developing readers. Results with adults (Experiment 1) replicated the usual consonant/vowel asymmetry in transposed-letter priming. In contrast, no signs of an asymmetry were found with developing readers (Experiments 2-3). However, Experiments 1-3 did not directly test the existence of phonological involvement. To study this question, Experiment 4 manipulated the phonological prime-target relationship in developing readers. As expected, we found no signs of masked phonological priming. Thus, the present data favour an interpretation of the consonant/vowel dissociation in letter position coding as due to phonological rather than orthographic processing.
authors.affiliation: Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. mvila@psi.uminho.pt.
authors.forename: Montserrat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Comesaña
authors.affiliation: Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: Ana P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Soares
authors.affiliation: Department of Methodology and ERI-Lectura, University of Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Ana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Marcet
authors.affiliation: Department of Methodology and ERI-Lectura, University of Valencia, Spain.|BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia, Spain.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: letter position coding; lexical access; lexical decision; masked priming