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Case mixing impedes early lexical access: converging evidence from the masked priming paradigm

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Abstract

When letters are presented in mixed case (e.g., “PlAnE), word recognition is slowed. This case-mixing effect has been used to argue that early stages of word recognition operate holistically (on the entire visual word form) rather than merely letter-by-letter. Contrary to this holistic view, however, a masked priming study (Perea, Vergara-Martínez, & Gomez, Cognition 142:39–43, 2015) with Spanish words argued that case mixing has no effect on early stages of visual word recognition. Their participants made lexical decisions on an uppercase target (e.g., “PLANE”) preceded by an identical prime (e.g., “plane”) or an unrelated prime (e.g., “music”), presented in lowercase or mixed case. Because priming effects (unrelated–identical) were unaffected by case mixing, they concluded that case mixing does not impede early lexical access. We examined whether this finding applies to English words, while also including lowercase targets to prevent a strong bias against holistic word recognition. We found larger priming effects from lowercase primes than mixed-case primes regardless of target case (lowercase vs. uppercase) and whether target case was varied within blocks (Experiment 1) or between blocks (Experiment 2). Contrary to Perea et al.’s findings for Spanish, our results suggest an early locus for the case-mixing effect, consistent with the holistic view of word recognition.

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Notes

  1. Perea et al. (2015) did not provide enough information regarding the key prime type by case type interaction to perform a formal power analysis. However, with a sample of 40 participants in their study, they had insufficient power to detect a 6-ms effect. For that reason, and because we included an additional target case type, we felt it was important to more than double their sample size.

  2. Note that some letters are visually similar to each other in lowercase and uppercase presentation (e.g., “o” and “O”) and some words disrupt the grapheme in mixed-case (e.g., sOrRy, fUlLy; Kinoshita & Norris, 2010). We did not control how often these occurred. Therefore, occasional letter similarity between cases or grapheme disruption might have occurred in the present study. Note that holistic processing should still be disrupted by case mixing, because the uppercase and lowercase letters still always differ greatly in size, and the size difference distorts overall word shape.

  3. It has been argued that IES is not a good reflection of the relative weights of speed and accuracy. It also increases the variability of the measure, reducing power (e.g., Bruyer & Brysbaert, 2011).

  4. In Experiment 1, there was a trend towards a larger priming effect for lowercase primes than mixed-case primes for uppercase targets (the Perea et al. condition) that did not quite reach statistical significance. To further increase power, we increased the sample size from 96 participants in Experiment 1 to 120 participants in Experiment 2 (24 additional participants).

  5. Our bootstrap samples might have underestimated Perea et al.’s (2015) power as the total number of trials for uppercase targets was 160 in the present study whereas it was 240 in their study. However, even when we used the first 240 trials (including both lowercase and uppercase targets) from each participant, we found that 40-participant samples would produce significant results only about half the time.

  6. One could argue that the masked priming effect in the present study is based purely on non-lexical, form similarity rather than semantic priming via lexical activation. To evaluate the possibility of substantial non-lexical priming, we ran a companion experiment using a non-lexical, font discrimination task (i.e., using the same stimuli as in the current study except the target was printed in one of two different font types). We argued that if the priming effect was solely due to lexical activation, then the priming effect should be absent because lexical access is not required for font discrimination. However, if the priming effect actually reflects processes that have nothing to do with lexical processing, then the priming effect should still be evident. The key finding is that the priming effect was so small that it could barely be detected, even with an unusually large sample (N = 112): 3 ± 3 ms for word targets and 1 ± 3 ms for nonword targets. Thus, this companion experiment suggests that the priming effect observed in the present study was primarily due to lexical activation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Andrew Morgan for providing technical support. We also thank Ulrich Ansorge and Michael Masson for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychological Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331-5303, USA

    Mei-Ching Lien

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH, 44325-4301, USA

    Philip A. Allen

  3. Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001, USA

    Eric Ruthruff

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  1. Mei-Ching Lien
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Correspondence to Mei-Ching Lien.

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Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 9.

Table 9 Words and nonwords list
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Appendix B

See Table 10

Table 10 A summary table for ANOVAs on the target item response time (RT) and proportion of error (PE) as a function of target case type (lowercase vs. uppercase), prime case type (lowercase vs. mixed case), and prime–target relationship (identity vs. unrelated) for word and nonword targets in Experiment 1
Full size table

Appendix C

See Table 11

Table 11 A summary table for ANOVAs on the target item response time (RT) and proportion of error (PE) as a function of target case type (lowercase vs. uppercase), prime case type (lowercase vs. mixed case), and prime–target relationship (identity vs. unrelated) for word and nonword targets in Experiment 2
Full size table

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Lien, MC., Allen, P.A. & Ruthruff, E. Case mixing impedes early lexical access: converging evidence from the masked priming paradigm. Psychological Research 85, 1317–1337 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01305-4

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