PHONOLOGICAL AMBIGUITY IMPAIRS IDENTITY PRIMING IN NAMING AND LEXICALDECISION

The priming of a visually presented word by itself means that all repr esentations activated by the prime-orthographic, phonological semantic -are of direct relevance to the processing of the target. The phonolog ical coherence hypothesis (e.g., Van Orden & Goldinger, 1993) suggests , however, that the major constraint on the identity prime's influence is the time needed to achieve a stable phonological code. Serbo-Croat ian words such as XAREM (Cryillic) and ROBOT (Roman) support two phono logical codes, one corresponding to the word and one to a nonword. The nonwords XAREM and ROBOT composed from mixed Roman and Cyrillic lette rs have single phonological codes corresponding to the word readings o f XAPEM and ROBOT. With prime-target SOAs less than or equal to 70 ms, the target was primed by the nonword better than by itself in both na ming and lexical decision tasks. At an SOA of 250 ms, the nonword and the identity prime primed equally. Discussion focused on the primacy o f phonological codes in visual word recognition. (C) 1997 Academic Pre ss.