Identity priming in English is compromised by phonological ambiguity.

Number 1120
Year 1999
Drawer 21
Entry Date 11/22/1999
Authors Lukatela, G., Frost, S.J., & Turvey, M.T.
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Publication Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 3,775-790.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1120.pdf
Abstract If it talks longer to achieve a single phonological representation for inconsistent words (e.g., BOWL) than for consistent words (e.g., BENT), and if phonological coherence is pivotal to visual word recognition, then identity priming should depend on consistency. This hypothesis was evaluated in naming and lexical decision within a 4-field presentation sequence of mask-prime-mask-target. The prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was either 114 or 244 ms (with prime durations, respectively, of 43 and 129 ms). Four experiments compared identity primes such as BOWL and BENT, which were equated, on average, for total number of friendly and unfriendly neighbors, bigram frequency, and number of 1-letter-different neighbors. In both tasks, BENT primed itself better than BOWL primed itself, with the difference being larger at the shorter SOA. Word processing is constrained primarily by the rate of achieving a coherent phonological code.
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