Masked orthographic and phonological priming in visual word recognition and naming: Cross-task comparisons

The effects of briefly presented, masked, and orthographically and/or phonologically related nonword primes on the recognition of subsequently presented target words were investigated in different experimental tasks. Robust effects of orthographic and phonological priming were observed in both the lexical decision and the perceptual identification tasks, with no such effects appearing in the word naming task, except for orthographic priming effects at the shortest prime exposures. Further investigation of this marked dissociation across experimental tasks showed that word naming is particularly sensitive to shared onsets in the masked priming paradigm and that robust rhyme priming does occur when primes and targets have different onsets. The lexical decision task, on the other hand, showed priming effects independently of whether prime and targets shared onsets. These results are discussed within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model of visual word recognition and naming. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.