Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING 373
6.46, p < .01), as well as a facilitatory effect of the nal overlap condition
(F 1(1, 29) ˆ 47.47, p < .001, F 2(1, 35) ˆ 20.27, p < .001). Analyses
conducted on errors revealed no effect of overlap condition (F 1(2, 58 < 1;
F 2 (2, 70) < 1).
The partial priming results showed that the auditory presentation of a
prime (e.g., ‘‘ver’’) facilitates the subsequent processing of a target word
that begins with the same phonemes (e.g., ‘‘vertige’’), compared to an
unrelated prime (e.g., ‘‘brin’’). Moreover, the auditory presentation of the
end of this word (e.g., ‘‘tige’’), also facilitates its subsequent processing.
Note that because the primes used in this experiment were not only
fragments of the targets but also words, the question remains of whether
the lexicality of the primes inuenced the priming effects obtained. To
answer this question, pseudoword primes were used in Experiment 1b.
Method
EXPERIMENT 1B
Participants. Thirty students of the University René Descartes, Paris
V, participated in this experiment. They were selected in the same way as
in Experiment 1a but were paid for their participation.
Stimuli and design. We selected 36 bisyllabic target words from a
French database, TLF (Trésor de la Langue Française; Imbs, 1971).
Contrary to Experiment 1a, neither syllable of these bisyllabic words
matched an existing word (i.e. they were composed of two pseudowords,
e.g., CRAVATE [TIE]). As in Experiment 1a, each bisyllabic target was
associated to three monosyllabic primes. One prime corresponded to the
rst syllable of the target (e.g., cra-CRAVATE); another matched the
second syllable of the target (e.g., vate-CRAVATE) and a third served as
control prime (e.g., dule-CRAVATE). The targets’ average frequency is
25 occurrences per million (frequencies given by TLF). Stimulus word
durations (in milliseconds) were as follows: targets, 678 ms; initial-overlap
primes, 345 ms; nal-overlap primes, 523 ms; control primes, 435 ms.
Thirty-six bisyllabic pseudoword targets were constructed according to the
same criteria as the word targets and served as catch trials. Each contained
two embedded monosyllabic pseudowords used as primes. The experimental
lists also included 120 bisyllabic ller pairs without any relation
between primes and targets, half the targets being words and the other half
being pseudowords. Therefore, the proportion of related pairs is 25%. The
experimental words and pseudowords are listed in Appendix B. The
procedure was the same as in Experiment 1a.