Four lexical decision experiments using a masked priming paradigm were conducted to analyze whether the previous presentation of a syllabic neighbor (a word sharing the same 1st syllable) influences recognition performance. The results showed an inhibitory effect of more frequent syllabic primes and some facilitation of nonword syllabic primes (Experiments 1-3). When monosyllabic pairs were use...

The role of orthographic neighborhood (neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency) in visual-word recognition was analyzed using the masked repetition-priming paradigm. Specifically, we varied stimulus-onset asynchrony (33, 50, and 67 msec.) and type of prime (identical, unrelated, unprimed) in a lexical decision task. Analyses show additive effects of repetition and stimulus-onset asynchrony...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mental representation of cognate and noncognate translation pairs in languages with different scripts to test the prediction of dual lexicon model (Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997). Two groups of Persian-speaking English language learners were tested on cognate and noncognate translation pairs in Persian-English and English-Persian directions with...

Recent studies have demonstrated that processing of action words recruits cortical motor regions that are also involved in the planning and execution of the actions words refer to. The functional role of these regions in word understanding remains, however, to be clarified. The present study investigates this issue by examining the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on lexical decision performa...

Research consistently indicates the importance of phonological processing in early reading development, yet the role of phonology in skilled reading is still not well understood. Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments investigated the nature and time course of phonological processing during skilled visual word recognition using a masked priming paradigm. Phonological syllable priming was...

To examine the role of meaning in morphological decomposition ({re-}+{play}), researchers have employed the priming paradigm. Perceptually masked primes lead to facilitation both when decomposition is semantically appropriate (hunter-HUNT) and when it is not (corner-CORN), whereas with fully visible primes facilitation is observed only in the former case. We investigated the N400 brain potentia...

The present study investigated cross-language priming effects with unique noncognate translation pairs. Unbalanced Dutch (first language [L1])-English (second language [L2]) bilinguals performed a lexical decision task in a masked priming paradigm. The results of two experiments showed significant translation priming from L1 to L2 (meisje-girl) and from L2 to L1 (girl-meisje), using two differe...

Recent exposure to a stimulus improves performance with subsequent identification of that same stimulus. This ubiquitous, yet simple, memory phenomenon is termed priming and has been linked to another widespread phenomenon called repetition suppression, which is a repetition-induced reduction in human brain activation as measured using fMRI. Here, competing models of the neural basis of repetit...