Refine
Year of publication
- 2009 (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Institute
- Department Psychologie (2)
- Extern (1)
Evidence for semantic preview benefit (PB) from parafoveal words has been elusive for reading alphabetic scripts such as English. Here we report semantic PB for noncompound characters in Chinese reading with the boundary paradigm. In addition, PBs for orthographic relatedness and, as a numeric trend, for phonological relatedness were obtained. Results are in agreement with other research suggesting that the Chinese writing system is based on a closer association between graphic form and meaning than is alphabetic script. We discuss implications for notions of serial attention shifts and parallel distributed processing of words during reading.
We examined individual differences in masked repetition priming by re-analyzing item-level response-time (RT) data from three experiments. Using a linear mixed model (LMM) with subjects and items specified as crossed random factors, the originally reported priming and word-frequency effects were recovered. In the same LMM, we estimated parameters describing the distributions of these effects across subjects. Subjects’ frequency and priming effects correlated positively with each other and negatively with mean RT. These correlation estimates, however, emerged only with a reciprocal transformation of RT (i.e., -1/RT), justified on the basis of distributional analyses. Different correlations, some with opposite sign, were obtained (1) for untransformed or logarithmic RTs or (2) when correlations were computed using within-subject analyses. We discuss the relevance of the new results for accounts of masked priming, implications of applying RT transformations, and the use of LMMs as a tool for the joint analysis of experimental effects and associated individual differences.