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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 8, 2009
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(11):2659-2670; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp019
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Consonants and Vowels Contribute Differently to Visual Word Recognition: ERPs of Relative Position Priming

Manuel Carreiras1,2, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia2 and Nicola Molinaro2

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, 2 Instituto de Tecnologías Biomédicas, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205 Tenerife, Spain

Address correspondence to Manuel Carreiras, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 53, 20009 Donostia, San Sebastián, Spain. Email: m.carreiras{at}bcbl.eu.

This paper shows that the nature of letters—consonant versus vowel—modulates the process of letter position assignment during visual word recognition. We recorded Event Related Potentials while participants read words in a masked priming semantic categorization task. Half of the words included a vowel as initial, third, and fifth letters (e.g., acero [steel]). The other half included a consonant as initial, third, and fifth (e.g., farol [lantern]). Targets could be preceded 1) by the initial, third, and fifth letters (relative position; e.g., aeo—acero and frl—farol), 2) by 3 consonants or vowels that did not appear in the target word (control; e.g., iui—acero and tsb—farol), or 3) by the same words (identity: acero–acero, farol–farol). The results showed modulation in 2 time windows (175–250 and 350–450 ms). Relative position primes composed of consonants produced similar effects to the identity condition. These 2 differed from the unrelated control condition, which showed a larger negativity. In contrast, relative position primes composed of vowels produced similar effects to the unrelated control condition, and these 2 showed larger negativities as compared with the identity condition. This finding has important consequences for cracking the orthographic code and developing computational models of visual word recognition.

Key Words: consonants and vowels • ERPs • letter processing • relative position coding • visual word recognition


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