Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster's (2011) abstract letter unit account argues that the mechanism responsible for such effects acts at a totally abstract orthographic level (i.e., the visuospatial orientation is irrelevant to the nature of the relevant orthographic code). The present experiments expanded this debate beyond alphabetic scripts and the syllabic Kana script used by Witzel et al. to a logographic script (Chinese). Experiment 1 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects with primes and targets presented in both the conventional left-to-right horizontal orientation and the vertical top-to-bottom orientation, replicating Witzel et al. Experiment 2 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects even when both the primes and targets were presented in the right-to-left orientation, a rare but existent text orientation in Chinese. In Experiment 3, the primes, but not the targets, were presented in the right-to-left orientation. Priming effects were again obtained regardless of the fact that the primes and targets appeared in different orientations. Experiment 4, which involved primes and targets presented in a completely novel bottom-to-top orientation, also produced a TC priming effect. These results support abstract letter/character unit accounts of form priming effects while failing to support perceptual learning accounts. (PsycINFO Database Record

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demonstrated that backward primes (Roman alphabet example-dcba priming ABCD) produce large masked priming effects. This result suggests that character position information is quite imprecisely coded by Chinese readers when reading in their native language. The present question was, If Chinese readers have evolved a reading system not requiring precise position information, would Chinese-English bilinguals show more extreme transposed letter priming effects when processing English words than both English monolinguals and other types of bilinguals whose L2 is English? In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilinguals, but not English monolinguals, showed a clear backward priming effect in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, the parallel backward priming effect was absent for both Spanish-English and Arabic-English bilinguals. Apparently, the orthographic coding system that Chinese-English bilinguals use when reading in their L2 leans heavily on the flexible/imprecise position coding process that they develop for reading in their L1.Keywords Backward priming effect . Lexical decision task . Chinese . English Considerable research effort has been expended in recent years to try to understand the orthographic coding process (Grainger, 2018). The orthographic code is defined as the code that is established early in reading a word that codes both the identities of the letters contained in the word and their positions. It is assumed that it is this code that then allows

Perceptual learning accounts of orthographic coding predict that transposed-letter (TL) priming effects should be smaller when the prime and target stimuli are not presented in their canonical (left-to-right horizontal in English) orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005;Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, abstract letter unit accounts would propose that TL priming effects should be essentially unaffected by presenting stimuli in most unfamiliar text orientations (Witzel, Qiao, & Forster, 2011). In the present experiments, we examined masked TL priming effects with primes and targets presented in 3 different text orientations (e.g., 0°, as well as 90°and 180°rotations). Results revealed that the magnitude of the TL priming effect with native English readers was equivalent for stimuli presented in these three orientations, providing support for abstract letter unit accounts of orthographic coding.

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