The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2 years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

Whereas physiological studies indicate that illusory contours (ICs) are signaled in early visual areas at short latencies, behavioral studies are divided as to whether IC processing can proceed in a fast, automatic, bottom-up manner or whether it requires extensive top-down intracortical feedback or even awareness and cognition. Here, we employ a…

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and modulate their behavior. This has been shown for masked prime stimuli that influence motor responses to subsequent target stimuli. Beyond this, masked stimuli can also affect participants' behavior when they are free to choose one of two response alternatives. This finding…

The present research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

In a long-lag morphological priming experiment, Dutch (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures and read aloud words. A design using non-switch blocks, consisting solely of Dutch stimuli, and switch-blocks, consisting of Dutch primes and targets with intervening English trials, was administered. Target picture naming was facilitated…

Readers of the Roman script must "unlearn" some forms of mirror generalization when processing printed stimuli (i.e., herb and herd are different words). Here we examine whether the suppression of mirror generalization is a process that affects all letters or whether it mostly affects reversible letters (i.e., b/d). Three masked priming lexical…

When associations between certain visual stimuli and particular actions are learned, those stimuli become capable of automatically and unconsciously activating their associated action plans. Such sensorimotor priming is assumed to be fundamental for efficient responses, and can be reliably measured in masked prime studies even when the primes are…

Previous research on dual-tasks has shown that, under some circumstances, actions impair the perception of action-consistent stimuli, whereas, under other conditions, actions facilitate the perception of action-consistent stimuli. We propose a new model to reconcile these contrasting findings. The planning and control model (PCM) of motorvisual…

It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing was induced, and participants were…

According to a transfer-appropriate processing framework, immediate priming costs arise from a match between a prime and probe event on 1 dimension and a difference between those 2 events on some other dimension (i.e., a partial match). In Experiment 1, the authors used a Stroop priming procedure to generate 6 variants of partial match, yet only 1…

To compare abstract structural and lexicalist accounts of syntactic processes in sentence formulation, we examined the effectiveness of nonidiomatic and idiomatic phrasal verbs in inducing structural generalizations. Three experiments made use of a syntactic priming paradigm in which participants recalled sentences they had read in rapid serial…

Recent research has shown that letter identity and letter position are not integral perceptual dimensions (e.g., jugde primes judge in word-recognition experiments). Most comprehensive computational models of visual word recognition (e.g., the interactive activation model, J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981, and its successors) assume that…

This paper examined conceptual versus perceptual priming in identification of incomplete pictures by using a short-term priming paradigm, in which information that may be useful in identifying a fragmented target is presented just prior to the target's presentation. The target was a picture that slowly and continuously became complete and the…