中  華  心  理  學  刊
民92，45卷，1期，75-95

Jei-Tun Wu（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Hsin-Chin Chen（Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）

Abstract

Accompanied with the reliable facilitation effect of semantic (instead of homophonic) priming on character recognition and naming found in previous research, it was also observed that priming with orthographically similar characters inhibits recognition and naming of targets. The first two experiments manipulated prime character frequency, orthographic similarity, and SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony) in lexical decision and naming tasks. In the lexical decision task, the target characters which were preceded by an unmasked, orthographically similar prime of higher frequency were responded to slower than their dissimilar pair controls with SOAs of 50 ms and 500 ms. A similar inhibition effect was also observed in the naming task. When the SOA duration was extended to 1000 ms in Experiment 2, a significant inhibition effect was observed not only under conditions with primes of higher frequency but also with primes of lower frequency. In Experiment 3, pseudo-character primes were included. It was found that pseudo-character primes obtained no effect upon target recognition while manifesting a small inhibition effect on target naming under the prime exposure duration of 500 ms. In Experiment 4, an additional prime condition of free radicals in isolation was included. It was found in Experiment 4 that with the SOA of 50 ms or 500 ms, the embedded right component radical in isolation facilitated the recognition of the target character embedding it, while not exerting any effect on character naming.

Keywords：Lexical access, Character recognition, Character naming, Frequency effect, Character frequency, Prelexical phonology, Neighborhood frequency effect, Orthographic prime inhibition