Letter-position coding in random consonant arrays

Abstract

The processing of letter-position information in randomly arranged consonant strings was investigated using a masked prime variant of the alphabetic decision (letter/nonletter classification) task. In Experiment 1, primes were uppercase consonant trigrams (e.g., FMH) and targets were two uppercase Xs accompanied by the target letter or a nonletter (e.g., XMX X%X). Response times were systematically faster when target letters were present in the prime string than when target letters were not present in the primer string. These constituent letter-priming effects were significantly stronger when the target letter appeared in the same position in the prime and target stimuli. This contrast between position-specific and position-independent priming was accentuated when subjects responded only when all the characters in the target string were letters (multiple alphabetic decision) in Experiment 2 and 3. In Experiment 4, when prime exposure duration was varied, it was found that position-specific priming develops earlier than position-independent priming. Finally, Experiment 5 ruled out a perceptual-matching interpretation of these result. An interpretation is offered in terms of position-specific and position-independent letter-detector units in an interactive-activation framework.

The role of letter identity and letter position in orthographic priming

“…The aim ofthe next experiment was to test whether priming effects can be obtained when primes contain letters from the target word without respecting their relative position in the string. Our previous work with random consonant strings (Peressotti & Grainger, 1995) suggests that positionin-string information should critically determine the size of priming effects.…”

“…In previous work (Peressotti & Grainger, 1995), we found evidence in favor of position-independent letter coding that the rigid version of the IA model could not account for. Using random consonant trigrams as stimuli, we found both position-specific and position-independent priming effects.…”

Effects of prime—target spatial separation and attentional deployment on masked repetition priming

“…The results of Experiment 2 show that this was not the case. Furthermore, the attentional account can letter detectors first proposed by Peressotti and Grainger (1995) in order to account for their masked priming effects obtained with letter triples. In the model described in Figure 6, location-specific letter detectors in the alphabetic array code for the presence of a given letter identity at a given location along the horizontal meridian.…”

Influence of neighborhood size and exposure duration on visual-word recognition: Evidence with the yes/no and the go/no-go lexical decision tasks

“…The argument is that by minimizing part of the response selection process in the experimental task, the impact of response decision time on the obtained lexical decision time in the go/no-go task would be reduced (relative to the standard yes/no task), thereby reducing subsequent variability. However, Gordon (1983;Gordon & Caramazza, 1982;Peressotti & Grainger, 1995) did not report data that could be used to assess this claim. Finally, it may be of interest to mention that the go/no-go task seems to offer more accurate responding, faster RTs, and fewer processing resources than the yes/no task (Perea et al, 2002a).…”

“…Finally, let us examine briefly whether the go/no-go lexical decision task produces less noisy data than does the yes/no task, as was suggested by Gordon (1983) and Peressotti and Grainger (1995). If we use error variance (as measured by MS e s) as an estimate of the sensitivity of the procedure, the variability tends to be somehow higher with the go/no task than with the yes/no task (see the Results sections for Experiments 1 and 2; see, also, Hino & Lupker, 1998, 2000Perea et al, 2002b).…”