Bracco, G. & Laudanna, A.
Department of Communication Sciences. University of Salerno. Italy.
A debated issue in Psycholinguistics is whether or not a pre-lexical conversion of written words into a phonological code is needed to achieve lexical access: we addressed this issue in Italian, a language with a fairly transparent orthography. Three priming experiments using different prime durations (150 ms, 250 ms, 350 ms) were carried out to observe the putative time course of phonological code activation in the recognition of Italian words, by comparing homographic to homographic but non homophonic stems. In each experiment 48 verbal forms were used as targets in three priming conditions: A) prime/target containing homographic and homophonic stems (e.g., sparato/sparito, shooted/disappeared); B) prime/target containing homographic but not homophonic stems (e.g., pregi (/prεdʒ/)/prega (/prεg/), virtues/ he/she prays); C) prime/target sharing the initial orthographic pattern (e.g., tornio/tornavo, lathe/ I returned). In the control condition an unrelated prime was used for each target. Experimental and control lists were all matched for the degree of orthographic overlap between primes and targets. The results show that the effect of homographic stem is still robust until prime duration of 250 ms, whereas inhibitory orthographic priming requires a 350-ms prime presentation, when priming is also modulated by phonological information.