(QuarterlyJournal of Experimental Psychology, in press) Are coffee and toffee served in a cup? Ortho-phonologically mediated associative priming

We report three masked associative priming experiments with the lexical decision task that explore whether the initial activation flow of a visually presented word activates the semantic representations of that word’s orthographic/phonological neighbors. The predictions of cascades and serial/modular models of lexical processing differ widely in this respect. Using a masked priming paradigm (SOA=50 ms), words preceded by ortho-phonologically mediated associated “neighbors” (oveja-MIEL, the Spanish for sheep-HONEY; note that oveja is a phonological neighbor of abeja, the Spanish for bee) were recognized more rapidly than words preceded by an unrelated word prime (Experiments 1 and 3). Furthermore, the magnitude of the orthophonologically mediated priming effect (oveja-MIEL) was similar to the magnitude of the associative priming effect (abeja-MIEL). With visible primes and a 250 ms SOA, only the directly associated words showed a priming effect (Experiment 2). These findings pose some problems for a modular account and are more easily interpreted in terms of cascaded models.