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01-06-2025 | Research

Is letter position coding a unique skill for developing and adult readers in early word processing? Evidence from masked priming

Auteurs: Pablo Gómez, Ana Marcet, Francisco Rocabado, Manuel Perea

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 3/2025

Abstract

Reading words in alphabetic scripts requires encoding the relative order of the letters. This process of letter position coding is known to be flexible. For instance, the masked transposed-letter prime jugde activates the word JUDGE to a greater degree than a replacement-letter prime like jupte, a phenomenon known as the transposed-letter effect. In this study, we investigated whether the transposed-letter effect in masked priming is related to reading skills (as measured by a standardized reading test) in a sample of sixth-grade children. Targets (e.g., RITME: Catalan for rhythm) were preceded by identity primes (ritme), transposed-letter primes (rimte), or replacement-letter primes (risle) in a sandwich priming paradigm. Results showed that transposed-letter primes were more effective than replacement-letter primes but less effective than identity primes. More importantly, while the readers’ reading skills modulated overall latency and accuracy, we found no evidence that the participants’ reading skill modulated the size of the priming effects. This outcome prompted us to re-analyze analogous conditions in a masked priming mega-study with approximately 1000 adult participants (Adelman et al. Behav Res Methods 46(4):1052–1067, 2014), where we found a near-zero correlation between the size of transposed-letter priming and spelling and vocabulary tests. These findings suggest that if there are individual differences in the first moments of word processing, these are not detectable for neurotypical readers in laboratory tasks.

vorige artikel Development and sensory channel feedback effects in children’s number line estimation: evidence from both bounded and unbounded number estimation tasks

volgende artikel An upper temporal limit of action-effect integration as reflected by motor adaptation

Alleen toegankelijk voor geautoriseerde gebruikers

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting some of these analyses.

The composite measure of reading ability included the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-II UK, Wechsler, 2005), the Nelson Denny Reading Test (Brown et al., 1993), and the LexTale, among others.

For all BF ANOVAs in Study 1 and Study 2, the code in the BayesFactor R package: BayesFactor::anovaBF(Dep Variable ~ prime + subject + item, data, whichRandom = c(“subject”, “item”), rscaleFixed = .3).

We compare the model with prime as a factor versus the model without.

This shift in the RT distribution is consistent with an additive process; for this reason, we decided not to perform reciprocal transformations (see for discussion of this issue, Gellman & Hill, 2007; Gomez & Perea, 2020; Tan & Yap, 2016).

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Titel: Is letter position coding a unique skill for developing and adult readers in early word processing? Evidence from masked priming
Auteurs: Pablo Gómez
Ana Marcet
Francisco Rocabado
Manuel Perea
Publicatiedatum: 01-06-2025
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 3/2025
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-025-02080-w

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Is letter position coding a unique skill for developing and adult readers in early word processing? Evidence from masked priming

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