Abstract
The “recycling hypothesis” posits that the word recognition system is built upon minimal modifications to the neural architecture used in object recognition. In two masked priming lexical decision studies, we examined whether “mirror generalization,” a phenomenon in object recognition, occurs in word recognition. In Study 1, we found that mirrored repetition and mirrored transposed letter primes elicited significant and equivalent priming effects for mirrored targets. In Study 2, we found that mirrored and non-mirrored repetition primes both significantly facilitated processing of mirrored targets, but the priming effect was much larger for non-mirrored primes. In both studies, we also found evidence of gender differences as females showed faster response times and a larger mirror priming effect compared to males. Taken together, we conclude that mirror generalization occurs in the early orthographic stage of word recognition, but not in the later stage of lexical access, and there is a gender difference when reading mirror words.
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The data and material are available upon request from the authors.
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The codes for our analyses are provided in the result part of the article.
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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Huilan Yang, Department of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310018, China (e-mail: yanghuilan@mail.zjgsu.edu.cn); or Nick Reid, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada (e-mail: jreid256@uwo.ca).
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This research was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (22NDQN238YB) to Huilan Yang.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by HY. The first draft of the manuscript was written by HY and NR, all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Yang, H., Reid, J.N., Kong, P. et al. Mirror Generalization During Early Word Recognition. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 543–561 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09857-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09857-9