Does COATS Prime COAST? Masked Priming With Transposed-Letter Noun Forms in Russian

Abstract

The role of orthographic neighbors (e.g. trail – trial) in word processing has been discussed in many experimental studies. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment on Russian that examined the relationship between pairs of real words that differed only in two adjacent letters (e.g., klonu ‘cloneDAT.SG’ vs. kloun ‘clownNOM.SG’) that were transposed. The results let us conclude that high-frequency Russian noun forms in oblique cases are stored as a whole. They compete with lexical items that share all their letters, therefore the lexical inhibition occurs. As for low-frequency noun forms, they probably require some kind of morphological processing, that puts the lexical activation on hold. Therefore, we registered facilitation caused by the overlapping letters, rather than inhibition due to lexical competition.