Masked phonological priming in picture naming.

In a recent article, Ferrand, Grainger and Segui (1994), using the masked priming paradigm with very brief prime exposures (29 ms), reported that the prior masked visual presentation of the same phonological word form facilitated picture naming independently of whether the prime was the same word or a pseudo-homophone. Moreover, in terms of percent facilitation, this priming effect was similar in size, suggesting that it resulted from the preactivation in memory of the phonological representation corresponding to the picture name. In the present study, using the same masked priming paradigm, we demonstrate that when the prime is a homophone of a picture (e.g., ROWS for a picture of a ROSE) then facilitation effects measured relative to an unrelated prime word are practically the same size as when primes are nominally identical to the target (e.g., ROSE for the picture of a ROSE). These results allow us to reject an interpretation of priming effects in terms of semantic activation alone, because the homophone primes in the present study were semantically unrelated to the picture targets. The fact that picture naming was facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a homophone of the picture name suggests that the brief presentation of a written word is sufficient to activate phonological lexical representations that are involved in naming picture targets. These results suggest strongly that the representation underlying the masked repetition priming effect in picture naming is phonological in nature.