Can masked priming effects be obtained with words?

One important issue often neglected in the literature on visualword recognition, despite its obvious ecological validity, is how the cognitive system processes handwritten words. Although handscript was the initial and only way of writing/reading until the 15th century, the vast majority of psycholinguistic experiments use spotless printed words in which, unlike in handwriting, letters are physically separated within each word and the instances of each letter are identical (e.g., compare denied vs. ). Not surprisingly, there is some cost associated with the processing of handwritten words (Barnhart & Goldinger, 2010; Manso de Zuñiga, Evett, & Humphreys, 1991). Given the inherent noise in the bottom-up information from handwritten words, the cognitive system has to rely more on more effortful, top-down processes (Manso de Zuñiga et al., 1991). Consistent with this interpretation, lexical effects are magnified with handwritten words— including the effects of word frequency, regularity, bidirectional consistency, and imageability (see Barnhart & Goldinger, 2010). The aim of the present study is to investigate how the word-processing system processes handwritten words at the very early moments. To explore the earliest stages of visualword recognition, a highly useful technique is the masked priming paradigm (Forster & Davis, 1984; see also Grainger, 2008, for a recent review), in which a briefly presented prime word precedes the presentation of a target word. One highly robust and replicated phenomenon in this context is the masked repetition priming effect: Identification times to a target word are consistently faster when it has been briefly preceded by the same word than when it has been preceded by an unrelated word (Forster & Davis, 1984; see Dehaene et al., 2001, for fMRI evidence; see Carreiras, Duñabeitia, & Molinaro, 2009, for ERP evidence). Can words produce masked priming effects? Clearly, if masked priming occurs with handwritten primes, it will be possible to examine the impact of handwritten words on orthographic, phonological, or morphological processes at the earliest stages of processing using behavioral and/or neurophysiological techniques. Therefore, we believe that it is critical to demonstrate, in the first place, the existence of masked repetition priming with handwritten primes (i.e., the most robust form of masked priming). Previous research has found that masked priming effects are quite abstract in nature; indeed, they can be obtained between upperand lowercase typed words that are visually dissimilar (e.g., edge–EDGE; see Bowers, Vigliocco, & Haan, 1998). This would suggest that masked priming should extend between written and typed primes and targets—at least for easily readable prime words (e.g., –CABLE). However, the only published experiment on the issue, conducted by Qiao et al. (2010), failed to find a masked repetition priming effect with handwritten primes using a semantic categorization task (i.e., words referring to man-made objects vs. words referring to natural C. Gil-López (*) :M. Carreiras Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 53, 20009, Donostia–San Sebastián, Spain e-mail: [email protected]