Research article summary (published 29 Sep 2008):

Masked priming with orthographic neighbors: a test of the lexical competition assumption.

Full Abstract

In models of visual word identification that incorporate inhibitory competition among activated lexical units, a word's higher frequency neighbors will be the word's strongest competitors. Preactivation of these neighbors by a prime is predicted to delay the word's identification. Using the masked priming paradigm (K. I. Forster & C. Davis, 1984, J. Segui and J. Grainger (1990) reported that, consistent with this prediction, a higher frequency neighbor prime delayed the responses to a lower frequency target, whereas a lower frequency neighbor prime did not delay the responses to a higher frequency target. In the present experiments, using English stimuli, it was found that this pattern held only when the primes and targets had few neighbors; when the primes and targets had many neighbors, lower frequency primes delayed responses to higher frequency targets essentially as much as higher frequency primes delayed responses to lower frequency targets. Several possible explanations for these findings are discussed along with their theoretical implications. Considered together, the results are most consistent with activation-based accounts of the masked priming effect.

Author information

Author/s: Nakayama, Mariko (M); Sears, Christopher R (CR); Lupker, Stephen J (SJ);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Oct; vol 34 (issue 5) : pp 1236-60

Dates: Created 2008/09/30; Completed 2008/11/12;

PMID: 18823208, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Humans Inhibition (Psychology) Models, Psychological Pattern Recognition, Visual

Pattern Recognition, Visual Perceptual Masking Reaction Time Set (Psychology)

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