Masked Priming From Orthographic Neighbors: An ERP Investigation

168 MASSOL ET AL.300–550 ms target epoch (N400). Examination of Figures 4and 5 reveals that this interval contains the bulk of the activityresembling the classic N400 component. As can be seen in Figures4 and 5, targets following unrelated primes produced a morenegative-going wave in this epoch than target words followingrepeated primes, whereas the differences between targets followingunrelated and orthographic neighbor primes were quite small.Figure 6 clearly reveals the widespread nature of repetition primingeffects in this time window, and the notable absence of primingeffects from orthographic neighbor primes. These observationswere confirmed by the presence of a PRIMING TYPE ofPRIME interaction in column 1 (F(1, 19) 5.07, MSE 12.34,p .03, p 2 .21). Follow-up analyses revealed a significanteffect of REPETITION PRIMING, F(1, 19) 8.08, MSE 15.58, p .01, p 2 .29, and no effect of ORTHOGRAPHICNEIGHBOR PRIMES in this column (F 1).DiscussionThe results of Experiment 1 are in line with the predictions ofthe lexical inhibition account of priming from orthographic neighbors(Jacobs & Grainger, 1992; Segui & Grainger, 1990) and thefunctional significance of certain ERP components proposed byHolcomb and Grainger (2006, 2007) and Grainger and Holcomb(2009). Repetition priming and priming from orthographic neighborsshowed similar effects on the N250 component, althoughrepetition priming effects were less widely distributed. On theother hand, whereas repetition-priming effects became strongerand more widely distributed on the N400 component, the effects oforthographic neighbor primes were greatly reduced. This providesconverging evidence that the bulk of lexical influences on visualword recognition, at least in the conditions of masked priming, arearising after the N250 component. The fact that orthographicneighbor primes did not significantly affect ERP waveforms in thetime window of the N400 suggests that the facilitatory effects oforthographic overlap, as seen in the reduced negativity followingrepetition primes in this time window, were offset by an inhibitoryinfluence of orthographic neighbor primes.Nevertheless, it could be argued that the differences betweenrepetition priming and priming from orthographic neighbors foundin Experiment 1 are not because of the inhibitory influence ofneighbor primes, but simply because of the different level oforthographic overlap in the two related prime conditions (full vs.partial). Therefore, Experiment 2 provides a further investigationof this issue by comparing priming effects from orthographicneighbors that are high-frequency words (as in Experiment 1) withthe effects of nonword orthographic neighbors matched in terms oftheir orthographic overlap with targets. As noted in the introduction,orthographically related nonword primes tend to producefacilitatory priming in the lexical decision task (e.g., van Heuvenet al., 2001). Furthermore, a number of studies have shown facilitatorypriming from nonword primes and inhibitory priming fromword primes in the same experiments (Davis & Lupker, 2006; DeMoor et al., 2007; Ferrand & Grainger, 1996). Therefore, weexpect to observe the same pattern of effects as in Experiment 1,with a dissociation between the two types of priming (word neighborsvs. nonword neighbors) emerging after the N250 component.Experiment 2 also provides a direct comparison of ERP effects andbehavioral effects of orthographic neighbor primes by using thelexical decision task, 2 and slightly increasing prime duration to bein line with the prime durations typically used to obtain behavioraleffects. Indeed, prior behavioral research has shown that the size ofthe inhibitory effects of orthographic neighbor primes increaseswith small increases in prime duration in the lexical decision task(De Moor et al., 2007; Grainger, 1992).Experiment 2Experiment 2 provides a replication of the effects of orthographicneighbor primes found in Experiment 1 using a differenttask–lexical decision. The other main difference with respect to thefirst experiment is that the repetition condition from Experiment 1is replaced with a nonword neighbor prime condition. This manipulationof the lexical status of prime stimuli while maintainingdegree of orthographic overlap constant will provide a furthermeans to distinguish prelexical and lexical influences of orthographicneighbor primes.MethodParticipants. Thirty one undergraduate students (average age21.2 years old, 9 men) at the University of Provence received 15€for participation in this experiment. All were right-handed nativespeakers of French with normal or corrected to normal vision. Sixof these participants were excluded from analysis because ofexcessive movement artifacts during the experiment.Design and stimuli. A new set of prime-target pairs weregenerated with low-frequency target words and nonword primes.None of the target words had orthographic neighbors, and theiraverage printed frequency was six occurrences per million (New etal., 2001). Orthographically related nonword primes were createdby changing a single letter in the target word with a different letterto produce an orthographically legal letter string (e.g., hibit –HABIT [CLOTHES]). The target was the only orthographic neighborof these prime stimuli. The word neighbor prime conditionincluded in this experiment used the same set of low-frequencyword targets and high-frequency orthographic neighbor primes asExperiment 1, such that Type of Prime (word vs. nonword) wascrossed with Priming (related vs. unrelated) in a 2 2 factorialdesign. Therefore, as in Experiment 1, different sets of lowfrequencytarget word were tested in the two levels of the Type ofPrime factor. Unrelated prime – TARGET pairs were formed byre-arranging the related prime–target pairs within each level of theType of Prime factor, whereas ensuring that there was minimalorthographic and semantic overlap between primes and targets inthe re-pairings. Two lists of 180 prime–target pairs were constructedfor word targets (90 word prime trials and 90 nonwordprime trials), counterbalancing prime–target relatedness acrosslists such that targets preceded by a related prime in one list werepaired with an unrelated prime in the other list, as in Experiment2 A change in task was necessary. Although there are very few studiesexamining this question, it has been shown that responses in a semanticcategorization experiment (e.g., animal vs. nonanimal) are affected bywhether or not the target’s neighbors belong to the same semantic categoryor not (Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005). Therefore, this wouldhave necessitated a complete change in stimuli and very likely too fewstimuli per condition for an ERP study.