A recently accepted paper in EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Authors: Maria Dimitropoulou, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia & Manuel Carreiras.

Title: Phonology by itself: Masked phonological priming effects with and without orthographic overlap

Abstract: The activation of the phonological code plays a central role in visual word recognition. However, it is still unclear how this activation is integrated within this mainly bottom-up process. In the present masked priming study we combined Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes to investigate this issue. Greek-Spanish bilinguals performed lexical decisions on Greek and Spanish targets, briefly preceded by either phonologically related or orthographically and phonologically related prime words of the non-target language. Results revealed significant bi-directional cross-script masked phonological priming effects which disappeared under the influence of nearly overlapping orthographic representations. This pattern of effects suggests that there is fast and automatic language non-selective activation of the phonological code during the initial stages of visual word recognition but that this is clearly dependent on the orthographic properties of the input stimulus. The implications of our findings are discussed within the framework of current models of monolingual and bilingual visual word recognition.

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