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Visual and auditory priming influences the production of low-frequency spellings

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Abstract

Three experiments investigated whether production of low-frequency spellings could be influenced by other words containing those spellings. Participants saw visually-presented primes (Experiment 1) or heard primes presented auditorily and produced their spelling (Experiments 2 and 3). Primes either shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., chapl ai n) or only orthography (e.g., ord ai n) with the target word (e.g., porcel ai n). Following the primes, participants attempted to produce the correct spellings of auditorily-presented target words containing low-frequency spellings, such as the ai in porcelain. Participants correctly spelled the targets’ low-frequency spelling more often when preceded by either type of prime, relative to unprimed targets. Furthermore, priming only occurred when the prime’s spelling was produced correctly; primes spelled incorrectly reduced the correct production of target spellings. These results suggest that unlike the priming of nonwords, the basis of lexical priming of real words is orthographic, resulting from the priming of specific graphemes that increases the probability of reactivating the same spelling pattern in the target.

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Notes

  1. Because of constraints of certain spelling rules, the low- and high-frequency spellings of two targets did not match each other in phonology (siege and weight; exhort and inhabit).

  2. Recent norms for spoken word frequency have been provided by Pastizzo and Carbone (in press), which are very current and have been shown to correlate highly with written frequency counts, such as Kučera and Francis (1967).

  3. Because priming was only found for targets with low-frequency spellings in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 used those targets only, eliminating high-frequency spellings.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Michael Cortese, Chris Hadley, Lori James, and Tracy Linderholm for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also gratefully acknowledge research assistants Stephanie MacLaverty, Melinda Cothern, Shannon Hack, Katie Hoffman, Sean Hoover, Kathryn Lucas, John Parnofiello, Megan Rashid, Andrea Sell, and Kelly Tobaygo, for assistance in data collection and data entry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Florida, P.O. Box 112250, Gainesville, FL, 32611-2250, USA

    Lise Abrams, Dunja L. Trunk & Katherine K. White

Authors
  1. Lise Abrams
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  2. Dunja L. Trunk
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  3. Katherine K. White
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lise Abrams.

Additional information

This research was supported by a University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Research Award granted to Lise Abrams and a Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research awarded to Katherine White. Portions of this research were reported at the 41st annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in November 2000, the 44th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in November 2003, and the 16th annual convention of the American Psychological Society in May 2004.

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Lise Abrams, Department of Psychology, University of Florida, PO Box 112250, Gainesville, FL, 32611-2250. E-mail: abrams@ufl.edu. Dunja Trunk is now at Bloomfield College, Department of Psychology, 59 Fremont Street, Bloomfield, NJ, 07003, E-mail: dunja_trunk@bloomfield.edu. Katherine White is now at the College of Charleston, Department of Psychology, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424, E-mail: whitek@cofc.edu.

Appendices

Appendices

Appendix A Primes and target words corresponding to low- and high-frequency target spellings in Experiment 1
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Appendix B Primes and targets corresponding to the target spelling in Experiment 2
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Appendix C Primes and targets corresponding to the target spelling in Experiment 3
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Abrams, L., Trunk, D.L. & White, K.K. Visual and auditory priming influences the production of low-frequency spellings. Read Writ 21, 745–762 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-007-9090-x

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