Consonants and vowels contribute differently to visual word recognition: ERPs of relative position priming

Abstract

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.