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Recent evidence has shown that suffixes influence nonword processing only when they follow an existing stem (e.g., in 'shootment', but not in 'mentshoot'), suggesting that their mental representation is position-locked (Crepaldi, Rastle & Davis, 2010). These results raise questions about the nature of morpheme position coding, an issue that has typically been neglected in morphological research; although it is clear that morphemes must be coded for position during word identification (otherwise we could not distinguish between words like 'overhang' and 'hangover'), even the most recent theoretical attempts (e.g., Crepaldi, Rastle, Coltheart & Nickels, 2010; Taft, 2006) have not addressed this issue. In the present experiments we asked whether prefix and stem identification is also sensitive to positional constraints (as suffix identification is). In Experiment 1 we showed that the rejection time of pseudo-prefixed nonwords (e.g., predrink) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., pledrink), which was not the case when the prefix followed the stem (e.g., drinkpre took as long as drinkple to be rejected). This result suggests that prefix identification is position-specific. In Experiment 2 we showed that the rejection time of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), indicating that 'honey' and 'moon' were identified within 'moonhoney', and the representations of these morphemes then activated (at least partially) the word 'honeymoon'. This result suggests that stems are coded is a position-independent fashion. This latter conclusion was strengthened by the results of Experiment 3, in which the masked presentation of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitated the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast monomorphemic control pairs did not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for ‘moonhoney’ pairs was not due simply to orthographic similarity.

Crepaldi, Rastle and Davis (2010) have demonstrated that morpheme interference effects do not emerge in morphologically structured psuedowords where a suffix precedes a stem (e.g., mentshoot is as difficult to reject as mantshoot), showing that suffix identification is sensitive to positional constraints. In this study we investigate the same issue in the other types of English morphemes, i.e., stems and prefixes. In two lexical decision experiments, we show that (i) the rejection time of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin); and (ii) the rejection time of pseudo‑prefixed nonwords (e.g., predrink) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., pledrink), but the effect disappears when the prefix follows the stem (e.g., drinkpre took as long as drinkple to be rejected). These data extend Crepaldi et al.'s (2010) findings and show that stem identification is position‑independent, whereas affix identification is position‑specific.

Recently, Colombo, Spinelli, and Lupker, using a masked transposed letter (TL) priming paradigm, investigated whether consonant/vowel (CV) status is important early in orthographic processing. In four experiments with Italian and English adults, they found equivalent TL priming effects for CC, CV, and VC transpositions. Here, we investigated that question with younger readers (aged 7–10) and adults, as well as whether masked TL priming effects might have a phonological basis. That is, because young children are likely to use phonological recoding in reading, the question was whether they would show TL priming that is affected by CV status. In Experiment 1, target words were preceded by primes in which two letters (either CV, VC, or CC) were transposed versus substituted (SL). We found significant TL priming effects, with an increasing developmental trend but, again, no letter type by priming interaction. In Experiment 2, the transpositions/substitutions involved only pairs of vowels with those vowels having either diphthong or hiatus status. The difference between these two types of vowel clusters is only phonological; thus, the question was, “Would TL priming interact with this factor?” TL priming was again found with an increasing trend with age, but there was no vowel cluster by priming interaction. There was, however, an overall vowel cluster effect (slower responding to words with hiatuses) which decreased with age. The results suggest that TL priming only taps the orthographic level, and that CV status only becomes important at a later phonological level.

In interference tasks (e.g., Stroop, 1935), congruency effects are larger following a congruent versus an incongruent trial. This "congruency sequence effect" has been traditionally explained in terms of a conflict-monitoring mechanism that focuses attention toward relevant information when conflict has recently been experienced. More recently, it has been suggested that effects of this sort result from differences in the temporal expectancies formed following congruent trials (fast responding) versus incongruent trials (slow responding). Evidence supporting this "temporal-learning" account was recently reported for a similar effect, the finding that congruency effects are larger in a mostly congruent list than in a mostly incongruent list. That is, consistent with the idea that this "proportion-congruent effect" is based on different temporal expectancies following congruent versus incongruent trials in interference tasks, the proportion-congruent effect was eliminated on normal (i.e., immediate-response) trials when temporal expectancies were equated by requiring a delayed response on the prior trial. In two experiments, we examined whether this delayed-response procedure would have a similar impact on the congruency sequence effect. Consistent with the temporal-learning account (but not inconsistent with conflict-monitoring accounts), the congruency sequence effect on immediate-response trials was eliminated when the previous trial required a delayed response. However, no evidence supporting the temporal-learning account emerged from reanalyses of experiments requiring only immediate responses in which the response latency in the previous trial functioned as the temporal-expectancy index. Overall, the present results and analyses do not provide much evidence favoring the temporal-learning account over conflict-monitoring accounts of the congruency sequence effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide proportion-congruent effect and one that elicits an item-specific proportion-congruent effect. In both cases, the relevant finding is that congruency effects are reduced when the proportion of congruent to incongruent items is smaller. These effects are validated measures of proactive and reactive control, respectively, and are aspects of executive attention known to be associated with individual differences in working memory capacity. We reasoned that if bilingualism affects executive attention in a similar way as does working memory capacity, indices of proactive and reactive control should be comparably associated with continuous variation in language status and working memory capacity. In two experiments, we replicated previous findings that working memory capacity is associated with variation in congruency effects (suggesting greater reliance on proactive control). In contrast, language status had no consistent association with performance, save for a hint that bilingualism may be associated with greater reliance on reactive control. Thus, the bilingual advantage may exist, but not in proactive control or any other aspects of executive attention that have been proposed thus far. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In the Stroop task, congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between incongruent stimuli, e.g., the word BLUE written in the color red, and congruent stimuli, e.g., RED in red) are smaller in a list in which incongruent trials are frequent than in a list in which incongruent trials are infrequent. The traditional explanation for this pattern is that a conflict-monitoring mechanism adjusts attention to task-relevant versus task-irrelevant information in a proactive fashion based on list-wide conflict frequency. More recently, however, multiple alternative explanations have been advanced that could explain the pattern without invoking this form of proactive control: Individuals might only adapt to conflict frequency specific to individual items (as opposed to list-wide conflict frequency), they could learn word–color contingencies (e.g., how often a particular word and color are paired), or they could adapt attention based on whether the words are informative of the color (even if many word–color pairings are incongruent) in the list as a whole. To examine this issue, we designed a new paradigm that should eliminate any impact of these alternative mechanisms. In that paradigm, the proportion of neutral (e.g., XXX in red) and incongruent stimuli was manipulated across lists. Paralleling the results in the original paradigm, there was a smaller latency difference between incongruent and neutral stimuli in a list in which incongruent trials were frequent than in a list in which incongruent trials were infrequent, suggesting that proactive control in response to list-wide conflict frequency is a process humans can and do use.

Norris, Kinoshita and colleagues (Kinoshita & Norris, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 1–18, 2009; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(3), 434–455, 2010; Norris & Kinoshita, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(1), 194–204, 2008) have suggested that the masked priming same-different task (SDT) is an excellent tool for studying the orthographic coding process because, in most circumstances, performance in that task is driven entirely by orthographic codes. More specifically, although evidence of phonological influences (i.e., phonological priming effects in the SDT) have been reported, Kinoshita, Gayed, and Norris (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(11), 1661–1671, 2018) have claimed that phonological priming does not arise in the SDT when the prime and target are written in the same script and the targets are words, the most typical experimental situation. Indeed, it does appear that no-one has yet reported phonological priming effects in such situations. The question of whether it is possible to observe phonological priming in such situations was more fully examined in the present experiments. Experiment 1 involved a masked priming SDT using Japanese Kanji script in which the primes and targets were homophonic but shared no characters. Experiment 2 was a parallel experiment using Chinese stimuli. In both experiments, phonological priming effects were observed for both one- and two-character words. These experiments indicate that, although the priming effects in masked priming SDTs undoubtedly have a strong orthographic basis, phonological codes also play a role even when the prime and (word) target are written in the same script.

Three masked priming paradigms, the conventional masked priming lexical-decision task (Forster & Davis, 1984), the sandwich priming task (Lupker & Davis, 2009), and the masked priming same-different task (Norris & Kinoshita, 2008), were used to investigate priming for a given target (e.g., JUDGE) from primes created by either adding a letter to the beginning of the target (e.g., zjudge) or replacing the target’s initial letter (e.g., zudge). Virtually all models of orthographic coding that allow calculation of orthographic similarity measures predict that zjudge should be the better prime because zjudge contains all the letters in JUDGE in their correct order whereas zudge does not. Nonetheless, Adelman et al.’s (2014) megastudy data indicated no difference in the effectiveness of these two prime types. The present experiments provide additional support for the conclusion of no difference between these two prime types with the only observed difference being a small zudge prime advantage in Experiment 1b (sandwich priming). These results suggest that models of orthographic coding/word recognition may be well served by allowing inconsistent information (e.g., the “z” in both zjudge and zudge indicates that the presented prime is not JUDGE) to be given considerable weight during the orthographic coding/word recognition process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)Public Significance Statement: To understand the reading process, it is crucial to understand how the orthographic coding process is carried out. Our findings suggest that the importance of negative information in that process (e.g., there is not a “j” in the word being read) has been overlooked in most models of the reading process, implying that the importance of positive information may be being overstated in current models and in reading instruction.

There are now a number of reports in the literature that transposed letter (TL) priming effects emerge when two consonants are transposed (e.g., caniso-CASINO) but not when two vowels are transposed (e.g., cinaso-CASINO). In the present article, four masked priming lexical decision experiments, two in Italian and two in English, are reported in which TL priming effects involving the transposition of two adjacent consonants (e.g., atnenna-ANTENNA) were contrasted with those involving the transposition of a vowel and an adjacent consonant (e.g., anetnna-ANTENNA), a contrast not directly examined in the previous literature. In none of the experiments was there any indication that the priming effects were different sizes for the two types of transpositions, including Experiment 4 in which a sandwich priming paradigm was used. These results support the assumption of most orthographic coding models that the consonant–vowel status of the letters is not relevant to the nature of the orthographic code. The question of how to reconcile these results with other TL manipulations investigating vowel versus consonant transpositions is discussed.

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster's (2011) abstract letter unit account argues that the mechanism responsible for such effects acts at a totally abstract orthographic level (i.e., the visuospatial orientation is irrelevant to the nature of the relevant orthographic code). The present experiments expanded this debate beyond alphabetic scripts and the syllabic Kana script used by Witzel et al. to a logographic script (Chinese). Experiment 1 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects with primes and targets presented in both the conventional left-to-right horizontal orientation and the vertical top-to-bottom orientation, replicating Witzel et al. Experiment 2 showed masked repetition and TC priming effects even when both the primes and targets were presented in the right-to-left orientation, a rare but existent text orientation in Chinese. In Experiment 3, the primes, but not the targets, were presented in the right-to-left orientation. Priming effects were again obtained regardless of the fact that the primes and targets appeared in different orientations. Experiment 4, which involved primes and targets presented in a completely novel bottom-to-top orientation, also produced a TC priming effect. These results support abstract letter/character unit accounts of form priming effects while failing to support perceptual learning accounts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like overhang and hangover, and to recognize that preheat is a word, whereas heatpre is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the end of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010, "Morphemes in Their Place: Evidence for Position-Specific Identification of Suffixes," Memory & Cognition, 38, 312-321), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position-independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., overdress and dresser). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), suggesting that honey and moon are identified within moonhoney, and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word honeymoon. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitates the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for moonhoney pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing.

A number of recent developments in the research on bilingualism and visual word recognition have convinced me that the time is ripe to integrate both topics. As many of the developments were due to the use of the masked priming paradigm, the present book may indeed be the ideal outlet to summarise the main findings in these research areas and to discuss some of the ongoing intergration work.