Masked Translation Priming Effects for Chinese-English-Japanese Triple Cognates in Lexical Decision Tasks.

Previous research has demonstrated cognate translation priming effects in masked priming lexical decision tasks (LDTs) even when a bilingual's two languages have different scripts. Because those effect sizes are normally larger than with noncognates, the effects have been partially attributed to the impact of prime-target phonological similarity. The present research extended that work by examining priming effects when using triple different-script cognates, i.e., /ka1 feɪ1/-coffee-コーヒー/KoRhiR/. Specifically, masked cognate priming effects were examined in six different priming directions (i.e., L1↔L2, L1↔L3, and L2↔L3) for Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals using LDTs. Significant priming effects were observed only when the primes were from the stronger language. This asymmetric pattern suggests that the phonological similarity of cognate primes only facilitates the processing of different-script triple cognates to the extent that the processing of the prime is robust enough to make phonology available before target processing is finished.

A spatial version of the Stroop task for examining proactive and reactive control independently from non-conflict processes.

Conflict-induced control refers to humans' ability to regulate attention in the processing of target information (e.g., the color of a word in the color-word Stroop task) based on experience with conflict created by distracting information (e.g., an incongruent color word), and to do so either in a proactive (preparatory) or a reactive (stimulus-driven) fashion. Interest in conflict-induced control has grown recently, as has the awareness that effects attributed to those processes might be affected by conflict-unrelated processes (e.g., the learning of stimulus-response associations). This awareness has resulted in the recommendation to move away from traditional interference paradigms with small stimulus/response sets and towards paradigms with larger sets (at least four targets, distractors, and responses), paradigms that allow better control of non-conflict processes. Using larger sets, however, is not always feasible. Doing so in the Stroop task, for example, would require either multiple arbitrary responses that are difficult for participants to learn (e.g., manual responses to colors) or non-arbitrary responses that can be difficult for researchers to collect (e.g., vocal responses in online experiments). Here, we present a spatial version of the Stroop task that solves many of those problems. In this task, participants respond to one of six directions indicated by an arrow, each requiring a specific, non-arbitrary manual response, while ignoring the location where the arrow is displayed. We illustrate the usefulness of this task by showing the results of two experiments in which evidence for proactive and reactive control was obtained while controlling for the impact of non-conflict processes.

La posición de las letras externas en el reconocimiento visual de palabras / The role of external letter positions in visual word recognition

Experimentos recientes han mostrado que los efectos de transposición de letras son muy robustos, incluso cuando se trasponen letras (internas) no adyacentes (caniso activa CASINO). En este trabajo se presenta, en primer lugar, un estudio computacional que examina hasta qué punto la información de la posición de las letras es necesaria para acceder a la entrada léxica adecuada. En segundo lugar, se presenta un experimento de «priming» enmascarado con la tarea de decisión léxica para determinar si los efectos de transposición de letras aparecen cuando se transpone la letra inicial. Hubo dos tipos de estímulos-señal: 1) pseudopalabras creadas al transponer las letras primera y tercera (démula-MÉDULA), y 2) pseudopalabras creadas al sustituir las letras primera y tercera (bérula-MÉDULA). Los resultados mostraron que el efecto de transposición de letras no ocurre al transponer la primera letra. Se examinan las implicaciones de estos resultados para los modelos de reconocimiento de palabras

A key issue for any computational model of visual word recognition is the choice of an input coding schema, which is responsible for assigning letter positions. Such a schema must reflect the fact that, according to recent research, nonwords created by transposing letters (e.g., caniso for CASINO), typically, appear to be more similar to the word than nonwords created by replacing letters (e.g., caviro). In the present research, we initially carried out a computational analysis examining the degree to which the position of the transposition influences transposed-letter similarity effects. We next conducted a masked priming experiment with the lexical decision task to determine whether a transposed-letter priming advantage occurs when the first letter position is involved. Primes were created by either transposing the first and third letters (démula-MÉDULA) or replacing the first and third letters (bérula-MÉDULA). Results showed that there was no transposed-letter priming advantage in this situation. We discuss the implications of these results for models of visual word recognition