Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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Downloaded By: [Universitaetsbibliothek] At: 15:27 19 June 2007 PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING 375 and vate, leading to shorter response times for vertige and cravate, whose representations have been preactivated. A third possibility is that initial and nal facilitation effects reect different levels of processing. In order to examine this point, primes and targets were presented in different modalities in the following experiment. If the preactivation of sublexical units is the only origin of the facilitation observed for initial and nal overlap, no facilitation should be found using a crossmodal paradigm, because the sublexical units activated by the prime could not be reused to speed up the processing of the target in this case. On the contrary, if initial and nal facilitations reect the activation of the lexical representation of the target, they should be modality independent and should remain when tested in different modalities. As the data reviewed in the introduction suggest, beginning overlap effects reect lexical competition. Therefore we hypothesise that in the partial priming condition of Experiments 1a and 1b, with the rst syllable of the target presented as prime, the facilitation reects the activation of the lexical representation of the target, and not only the use of preactivated sublexical units. If this hypothesis is true, we predict that the initial overlap effect will be observed with a crossmodal paradigm. On the contrary, the nal facilitation effect has been interpreted as the result of activation of sublexical units by the prime. Therefore, we predict that the effect will disappear in the crossmodal paradigm. To further ascertain the nature of the beginning overlap effect, we compared the partial priming condition with a condition of bisyllabic priming in which bisyllabic words sharing the rst syllable with the target served as primes (verger-VERTIGE, [orchard-VERTIGO]. This bisyllabic priming condition parallels the beginning overlap that is generally used in phonological priming experiments with monosyllables since the activation of a given candidate is measured after the processing of mismatching information. 3 Note nally that we aimed to compare bisyllabic word primes and monosyllabic primes. Because the lexicality of the prime did not inuence our previous effects, only word primes were used in the following experiments. Method EXPERIMENT 2 Participants. Sixty students participated in this experiment for course credit. All participants were native speakers of French, had normal or 3 Final overlap bisyllabic primes were used in the crossmodal experiment to parallel the experimental conditions of the partial priming. A null effect is predicted in this condition for the same reason as for the nal partial priming.
Downloaded By: [Universitaetsbibliothek] At: 15:27 19 June 2007 376 SPINELLI, SEGUI AND RADEAU corrected vision and reported no hearing impairment. Half of them were tested in the partial priming condition, and the other half in the bisyllabic priming condition. Stimuli and design. For the partial priming condition, the primes were re-recorded tokens of the primes used in Experiment 1a. The average duration of the primes was 343 ms for the initial-overlap set, 369 ms for the nal-overlap set and 395 ms for the control condition. For the bisyllabic priming condition, the 36 bisyllabic word targets of Experiment 1a also served as targets. Three bisyllabic prime words were chosen for each target. One began with the rst syllable of the target (e.g., verger-VERTIGE, [orchard- VERTIGO], beginning-overlap condition); one ended with the second syllable of the target (e.g., prestige-VERTIGE, nal-overlap condition) and one was not related to the target (e.g., tambour [drum]- VERTIGE, control condition). Stimulus word frequencies (per million) were as follows: initial-overlap primes, 8; nal-overlap primes, 8; control primes, 7. Stimulus word durations (in milliseconds) were as follows: initial-overlap primes, 575 ms; nal-overlap primes, 613 ms; control primes, 611 ms. Thirty-six bisyllabic pseudowords containing two embedded words served as catch trials. As ller targets, 120 bisyllabic items (60 words and 60 pseudowords) were included in the experimental lists. One hundred and twenty bisyllabic words unrelated to the targets served as ller primes. The proportion of related items was 25%. The experimental words and pseudowords are listed in Appendix C. Procedure. The prime words were recorded in a soundproof room by a female native speaker of French. The stimuli were sampled at 44 kHz and then transferred in a computer at a sampling rate of 22.05 kHz and 16 bit conversion using the Wave Studio sound editor. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room. The prime was presented auditorily at a comfortable sound level through Sony MDR-P1 headphones. At the end of the auditory prime and after a delay of 50 ms (ISI), the target was visually displayed in upper case at the centre of the computer screen and remained on the screen until the participant’s response. The participants were informed that the visual target could be either a word or a pseudoword and were asked to perform a lexical decision task on the visual target. The computer clock was triggered by the presentation of the target on the screen and stopped by the response. Each participant was tested either in the partial or in the bisyllabic priming condition.
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