The role of letter position for visual word processing: an experimental study on Russian

Abstract

Experiments with orthographic neighbors are one of the main methods to study letter processing during visual word recognition. We study the role of letter position for lexical access. Although this factor is expected to play an important role, it did not reach significance in the previous experiments (e.g. (Grainger, 1988) using four-letter Dutch words). We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment on Russian. All primes were nonce words, five-letter targets were real nouns in nominative singular or nonce nouns. Two factors were manipulated: whether the prime was a one-letter substitution neighbor of the target (experimental vs. control condition); whether the substituted letter in the experimental condition was word-initial, word-final or word-medial (e.g. rivan, disan, divap, and sifar for the target divan ‘sofa’). All substitution primes decreased response latencies compared to the control condition, as in many previous studies with nonce neighbor primes. Surprisingly, the substitution in the beginning increased the size of the priming effect compared to the middle of the word, and there was also a tendency between word-final and word-medial position in the same direction. This partially replicates our findings from a previous experiment with real word primes (Slioussar & Alexeeva, 2017), in which the priming effect was found to be more pronounced for word-final letters than for the middle-letters (word-initial letters were not included). Together, these results show that, although word-initial and word-final letters are known to be more salient in perceptual tasks, they might be less important for candidate activation during lexical processing.