Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING 379
the auditorily presented primes ‘‘kapitaal’’ (capital) and ‘‘kapitein’’
(captain). However, when the visual target appeared at the end of the
prime, only the appropriate related target was facilitated. This showed
that, although both candidates had been activated in a rst stage,
facilitation disappeared as soon as the sensory information favoured one
of the candidates over the others.
In Experiments 1a, 1b and 2, we used a lexical decision task. It could be
argued that a checking mechanism for congruency between prime and
target would be involved in our effects (Balota & Chumbley, 1984). Such a
mechanism would be described as the tendency of the subjects to respond
« yes when the pairs are phonologically related and « no when the
pairs are not related. This would then lead to a decrease in response times
for the related pairs of words (since the result of checking for relatedness is
compatible with the word responses) and to an increase in response times
for the control pairs of words (since the result is not compatible with the
‘‘yes’’ responses in that case). Let us note that if this kind of checking
mechanism was involved, it should produce a facilitation effect for both
kinds of overlap and not only for beginning overlap. However, to conrm
that the beginning overlap facilitation effect did result from activation by
the prime of the representation of the target, in Experiment 3, the partial
priming conditions of Experiments 1a and 2 were re-examined with a
naming task.
Method
EXPERIMENT 3
Participants. Thirty students participated in this experiment for course
credit. They were selected according to the same criteria as in Experiment
2.
Stimuli and design. The items were the same as those of Experiment 1a
and 2 (partial priming). However, pseudowords were not included in this
experiment.
Procedure. The stimuli were presented as in Experiment 2. Instead of
performing a lexical decision task on the targets, the participants were
asked to pronounce each word as rapidly and as accurately as possible. The
vocal response triggered a voice key connected to the computer. The target
remained on the screen until a vocal response was made. Naming latencies
were measured from target onset to the triggering of the voice key by the
participant’s response. Occasional naming errors were collected on-line by
the experimenter.