Jr. Booth et al., Quick, automatic, and general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers, DEVEL PSYCH, 35(1), 1999, pp. 3-19
Second through 6th graders were presented with nonword primes (orthographic
, pseudohomophone, and control) and target words displayed for durations (3
0 and 60 ms) that were brief enough to prevent complete processing. Word re
ading skills were assessed by 3 word and nonword naming tasks. Good readers
exhibited more orthographic priming than poor readers at both durations an
d more pseudohomophone priming at the short duration only. This suggests th
at good readers activate letter and phonemic information more efficiently t
han poor readers. Good readers also exhibited an equal amount of priming at
both durations, whereas poor readers showed greater priming at the longer
duration. This suggests that activation was not under strategic control. Fi
nally, priming was reliable for both high- and low-frequency targets. This
suggests that readers activate consistent information regardless of target
word characteristics. Thus, quick, automatic, and general activation of ort
hographic and phonological information in skilled readers results from the
precision and redundancy of their lexical representations.