Repetition in visual word identification: benefits and costs.

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Repetition in visual word identification: Benefits and costs a

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Jennifer S. Burt , Tahli J. Kipps & Julian R. Matthews

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School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Published online: 19 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Jennifer S. Burt, Tahli J. Kipps & Julian R. Matthews (2014) Repetition in visual word identification: Benefits and costs, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67:10, 1986-2009, DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.896386 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.896386

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2014 Vol. 67, No. 10, 1986–2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.896386

Repetition in visual word identification: Benefits and costs Jennifer S. Burt, Tahli J. Kipps, and Julian R. Matthews

Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 11:41 06 November 2014

School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

University students performed lexical tasks with visually presented target words after the presentation of an identical or unrelated prime, at short (80–120 ms) or longer (410–710 ms) prime–target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Experiment 1 showed perceptual identification benefits in vocal responding at a short SOA that were reduced (accuracy) or reversed (latency) at a longer SOA. Experiment 2 showed a transition from a repetition benefit to a cost over 3 SOAs in a target-masked version of the lexical decision task (LDT; target displayed for only 141 ms). In Experiment 3 the repetition cost was replicated at a 530-ms SOA in the LDT with masked targets, but a repetition benefit was observed in the conventional LDT (target displayed until response). The dependence of repetition costs on target masking is more consistent with biases based on episodic confusions than refractoriness of lexical representations. Keywords: Visual word identification; Word repetition; Prime duration; Stimulus onset asynchrony; Perceptual identification; Lexical decision; Type-token individuation; Refractoriness.

Environmental stimuli that occur frequently typically become well learned and are handled efficiently as a result. Neuroimaging studies show that the increased availability of recently encountered stimuli often goes hand in hand with reduced cortical activity (Schacter & Buckner, 1998). In the reading domain, which is the focus of interest in the present paper, frequently occurring words are identified more quickly and accurately than rare words (Monsell, 1991), and words and phrases that have been read recently are read more easily (Levy, Nicholls, & Kohen, 1993). Word repetition benefits are well documented in the lexical decision task (LDT; word vs. nonword classification), the most popular task for investigating visual word identification (Forbach, Stanners, & Hochhaus, 1974; Kirsner & Speelman, 1996; Ratcliff, Hockley, & McKoon, 1985).

Repetition benefits may become costs when a particular instance of a repeatedly occurring event has to be singled out. In tests of episodic recognition of studied words, frequently occurring words are at a disadvantage compared with rare words, presumably because high-frequency words, unlike rare words, have been encountered recently outside the context of the memory experiment (Glanzer & Bowles, 1976). Disambiguating repeated occurrences of stimuli is not only a long-term memory problem. When stimuli are presented visually in a fixed location at fast rates of about 10 items per second (rapid serial visual presentation; RSVP), experimental participants often fail to report the second occurrence of a stimulus if it follows the first presentation within several hundred ms. This repetition blindness (RB) effect has been observed with word lists and sentences. Kanwisher (1987) suggested that a

Correspondence should be addressed to Jennifer S. Burt, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. E-mail: [email protected] Experiment 1 and part of Experiment 3 were conducted by Tahli Kipps, and Experiment 2 was conducted by Julian Matthews. These experiments were part of the requirements for these authors’ honours theses in Psychology.

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REPETITION IN VISUAL WORD IDENTIFICATION

repeated stimulus is processed more quickly, but there are temporal limitations on human ability to encode repeated occurrences of a stimulus as separate events. The present experiments examined the costs and benefits of repetition that are observed when a target word is presented visually for a response within several seconds after an identical or unrelated prime word (also termed identity priming). As is typical in this arrangement, no response was required to the prime. The studies followed up work by Huber and colleagues (Huber, 2008; Huber & O’Reilly, 2003), who reported repetition costs at long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in a similar paradigm. According to Huber (2008), habituation in lexical processing pathways for relatively long-duration primes explained how repetition benefits observed at short SOAs became costs at longer SOAs. The term refractoriness is used here, to distinguish repetition costs from different effects traditionally termed habituation (Davis, 1970; Sokolov, 1990). The participants were required to choose the target from a twoword test display, and it was suggested that refractoriness caused the target to suffer in a comparison of the fluency with which the target and the nontarget word were processed. Refractoriness was seen as an inevitable side-effect of sufficiently prolonged lexical activation during word identification, and it has a useful function in that it provides an inbuilt method of avoiding confusions about the episodic structure of event sequences, especially confusions about whether an event that is the same as (or similar to) a very recent event is a continuation of the prior event or a new instance of the event. The idea of lexical refractoriness has also been raised in studies of word repetition effects in rapid serial visual presentation (e.g., Luo & Caramazza, 1995). The alternative view pursued in the present studies is that repetition costs can be understood in terms of difficulties in parsing repeats as separate episodes, without assuming refractoriness. A major variable in the present experiments was the SOA between the prime and target, which Huber (2008) found dictated whether repetition effects were benefits or costs. The SOA in

Huber’s and the present studies was primarily determined by the duration of the prime. The evaluation of refractory effects dependent on prime duration requires that the prime duration be varied together with SOA, to allow assessment of the effects of prime duration while minimizing the dissipation of refractoriness during the time between removal of the prime and the presentation of the target. New independent variables in the present studies were whether the target was briefly displayed with a backwards pattern mask or presented in the clear, and target-word frequency. Masked versus clear presentation of the target was critical for resolving inconsistencies in the literature concerning whether word repetition costs or benefits are observed at long SOAs of around 500 ms. Word frequency has interactive effects with repetition benefits, but its effect has not been examined in relation to repetition costs.

Repetition in lexical tasks: Benefits Substantial repetition benefits in response latency usually are produced in the LDT (Forster & Davis, 1984; Ratcliff et al., 1985; Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977; Versace & Nevers, 2003). Repetition benefits in the LDT are also regularly observed in the masked priming paradigm, in which the prime word is presented briefly (say 50 ms) and sandwiched between pattern masks, so that participants are unable to report it (Bodner & Masson, 1997; Forster & Davis, 1984; Grainger, Diependaele, Spinelli, Ferrand, & Farioli, 2003). The speeded word naming task also produces robust repetition benefits in response latencies (Burt, Mardle, & Humphreys, 1996; McKone, 1995). In masked priming, the benefit of repetition in the LDT typically is of similar magnitude for words of high and low normative frequency, measured as the number of occurrences in text (Forster & Davis, 1984; Segui & Grainger, 1990), although the generality of this finding over item sets is disputed (Bodner & Masson, 2001; Kinoshita, 2006). In unmasked priming paradigms with clearly visible primes and prime-to-target

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SOAs of several hundred ms or more, there is a robust Prime Type × Target Frequency interaction, with larger benefits for low- than for high-frequency targets (Forster & Davis, 1984; Scarborough et al., 1977; Versace & Nevers, 2003), a result termed by Forster and Davis (1984) the frequency attenuation effect. Available evidence also indicates a frequency attenuation effect in the naming task (Katz et al., 2005). Accounts of word repetition effects in the lexical processing literature share the assumption that processing a word makes its memory representation more accessible for a brief period. For example, in Morton’s (1969) logogen model, identification of a word results in a brief persistence of activation of the word’s detector (logogen), with the consequence that the logogen can reach its threshold level of activation more quickly. Within interactive activation approaches, there is a hierarchy of processing levels, which are connected by bidirectional excitatory pathways, with modulation by inhibition within levels and from the higher levels to lower levels (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982). Within these models, preactivation within word units and sublexical (e.g., letter-level) units accounts for identity priming (Grainger et al., 2003; Robert & Mathey, 2005). On Forster’s search model, a recently identified word has its lexical entry open for a brief period (Forster, 1999). In connectionist frameworks, repetition and frequency effects may be seen as changes in connection strengths that constitute the word learning that is assumed to occur each time a word is read (Bowers, 2003).

Repetition costs The focus of interest in the present experiments is the recently observed reverse effect—that is, repetition costs for target words (Huber, 2008; Huber & O’Reilly, 2003; Huber, Shiffrin, Lyle, & Quach, 2002; Huber, Shiffrin, Lyle, & Ruys, 2001; Weidemann, Huber, & Shiffrin, 2005, 2008). In contrast to a substantial body of literature in the LDT and naming, at prime durations (and corresponding SOAs) in the range of approximately 400–2500 ms, Huber and colleagues found that target identification was less accurate after an

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identical than after an unrelated prime, or at least the magnitude of the repetition benefit in accuracy was less than at shorter SOAs. At shorter SOAs, the typical facilitatory effect of repetition was consistently observed. These short SOAs covered a range from 14 ms to 150 ms, thus including conditions in which participants were aware and unaware of the prime. Importantly, all of the above repetition costs were demonstrated in the perceptual identification task developed by Ratcliff and McKoon (1997) in which target words were displayed briefly and followed by a pattern mask, and the dependent variable was accuracy (percentage correct) on a two-word choice test between the target and a distractor word (hereafter the foil). This paradigm allowed them to prime both versus neither of the choice words and thus rule out a bias towards or against choosing the prime from the test display. Repetition costs in perceptual identification are not without precedent, with Marohn and Hochhaus (1988) reporting lower accuracy with identical than with unrelated primes when participants had to name aloud a masked briefly displayed target word, and the prime duration and prime–target SOA were approximately 500 ms. Repetition costs have also been observed in word naming when primes and targets were drawn with replacement from a very small word set (Milliken & Lupianez, 2007).

Repetition costs in attentional paradigms The best known word repetition cost in the attention literature is repetition blindness (RB), which has two alternative explanations, one account relying on difficulty in distinguishing separate episodes and a later account relying on refractoriness. The episodic account of Kanwisher (1987) makes a distinction between types and tokens, with a type being the category of a stimulus (e.g., the word clown) and a token being a specific encounter with the stimulus (cf. the object file, Kahneman, Treisman, & Gibbs, 1992). According to Kanwisher, RB reflects a failure (under time pressure) of token individuation of the two occurrences of a word. Specifically, there is difficulty binding an activated type to a new token, so that a repetition is not perceived as a separate occurrence,




and the additional type activation that it produces is attributed to the first occurrence of the item (Kanwisher & Potter, 1989; Park & Kanwisher, 1994). By contrast, others attribute RB to refractoriness of the word after it is processed on its first occurrence (Bond & Andrews, 2008; Huber, 2008, p. 326; Luo & Caramazza, 1995). There are a number of RB phenomena that cannot be explained by refractoriness—for example, “backward” RB effects, in which a second occurrence of a target affects perception of the first occurrence (Neill, Neely, Hutchison, Kahan, & VerWys, 2002; Wong & Chen, 2009). Word repetition effects frequently have been reported in other tasks in the attentional literature. In selective attention tasks with word distractors, facilitation of responses to a target may be observed when the distractor is repeated. Thus saying blue to the word red in blue lettering is easier if the immediately preceding trial also had the distractor word red (Lowe, 1979). In the noncolor word Stroop task, colour naming of the word house in, say, blue lettering is faster if a participant has just read the prime word house (in achromatic lettering) than if she has read an unrelated prime word (Burt, 1994, 2002). One interpretation of these results is that there is some refractoriness in the lexical processing system that facilitates ignoring (or inhibition) of a repeated word distractor, although Burt (1994, 2002) explained her results in terms of repetition benefits in lexical processing. There are additional accounts that reject inhibition or refractoriness in favour of mechanisms involving processes of episodic memory or attention (Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, & Seiffert, 1998).

The present experiments Of critical interest was whether the evidence does support refractoriness of lexical representations, or whether, as we hypothesized, repetition costs at longer SOAs arise in attentional or episodic memory processes recruited for parsing and recording events. In other words, our hypothesis was that the costs arise directly from difficulty disentangling consecutive events rather than being a side effect of a (refractory) mechanism that supports event parsing.

At short SOAs in lexical tasks, repetition benefits are the norm, and there is little disagreement about their interpretation. It is often assumed that participants effectively treat a brief prime and target as a single event (Huber, 2008; Humphreys, Besner, & Quinlan, 1988; Norris & Kinoshita, 2008). If there is no attempt to separate the prime and target events, then there can be no confusion about whether an identical target was a new occurrence of the prime. Primes that are similar or identical to the target may support the correct response by providing additional perceptual information consistent with the target. The precise mechanism of such priming effects differs over models of visual word identification. With respect to the repetition costs observed at longer SOAs in perceptual identification, the hypotheses that motivated the present studies were that (a) repetition facilitates visual word identification, and (b) that repetition costs at longer SOAs reflect bias effects. These bias effects are thought to result from tokenization of the prime together with difficulty tokenizing the target, in some respects like the suggestion of Kanwisher (1987) for RB. We assumed that when the prime is clearly available for 400 ms or more, participants have ample time to establish an episodic token of the prime word. However, when the target is briefly displayed and masked, tokenization of the target will be impaired. Note that in contrast to the typical situation in RB, we propose that it is not insufficient time between the prime onset and target onset that is thought to limit tokenization of the target; rather it is the brief masked presentation of the target. This idea is more in line with memory reconstructive accounts of the RB (Whittlesea & Masson, 2005), in that tokenization of the prime is not assumed to directly affect participants’ ability to tokenize the target. If the target is unrelated to the prime, the prime may have a detrimental forward masking effect on the target, but no response biases are expected. However, when the prime and target are the same word, then we predict that participants will experience a kind of “token confusion”. The first step in this confusion is that the prime increases activation in the target representation (the type), so that the perceptual evidence


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favours the target to a greater extent than in the unrelated prime case. The second step is that given uncertainty about the briefly displayed target, and knowledge that the same word has just been seen as the prime, participants are unsure whether the perceptual evidence for the identical target is trustworthy. They are unsure about the number of tokens they have seen—that is, whether the target is a new occurrence of the prime or whether they have mistaken the target for the prime. Thus they have a bias against the target and may respond with an alternative word based on the evidence provided by the target and the following mask (typically random consonants). When the target is displayed for a duration that is sufficiently long to support its clear identification, then we expect the bias effect to be replaced by a repetition benefit. The present account is similar to previous models based on the idea of evidence discounting (Huber et al., 2001; Ratcliff & McKoon, 2001), although unlike those models we appeal to a different mechanism to explain repetition benefits. Furthermore, a significant difference is that on our view a critical condition for a cost of prime– target identity is that perceptual information about the target is sometimes insufficient for participants to confidently report its identity. When the target is clearly visible, no decision bias against repeated targets is expected. For this reason, one of the present experiments manipulated the duration and masking of the target words. The experiments reported here were designed to (a) replicate the repetition cost in paradigms more typical of lexical processing research and (b) discover the basis of the repetition cost in lexical tasks. We examined SOA effects in vocal perceptual identification (Experiment 1) and the LDT (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 examined uncertainty about the target by assessing repetition effects in the LDT as a function of target duration (and backward masking).

EXPERIMENT 1 In Experiment 1 we assessed identity priming effects for five-letter words at a short and a moderately long

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SOA in a perceptual identification task. The detrimental effect of identity primes is termed a repetition cost, to be contrasted with the typically observed identity priming facilitation (also termed here a repetition benefit). In line with Huber (2008), primes and targets were presented in upper-case letters. However, in accordance with typical procedures in the lexical processing literature, there was only a single prime word, and we removed the forced choice test, with participants naming the target aloud. The aim was to assess whether the costs of repetition priming observed at longer SOAs in the perceptual identification choice task depended on methodological features that are atypical in the lexical processing literature, such as the doubleprime procedure and the choice test for target identification. On our token confusion account, participants were expected to show a bias against the prime at the longer SOA. In both cases, repetition would increase the probability that participants would fail to give a response, or provide another word based on the information from the target and the pattern mask (consonant string). In line with Huber (2008), the duration of the prime and the prime—target SOA were varied together. The SOAs in the present experiments were slightly longer than the prime duration because a postprime mask was used to perceptually separate the prime and target. The target duration was set at a single value designed to produce 80% accuracy on average. Following conventions in the lexical processing literature, response latencies to targets were analysed for correct responses. It was predicted, in line with Huber’s (2008) results in perceptual identification with a choice test, that identity primes would facilitate when the SOA was short but that there would be a repetition cost or a reduced benefit at the longer SOA (and longer prime duration).

Method Participants Thirty-two Introductory Psychology students with normal or corrected-to-normal vision participated for course credit. Twenty-seven were women, and their mean age was 19.5 years (range 17–27




years). They had previously completed a perceptual identification task that is not reported here. Participants had different word sets in the two tasks. Apparatus Stimulus presentation and response collection for all experiments were accomplished by a PC running an E-prime program (Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolutto, 2002), which also presented instructions at the beginning of the session. Students sat at a comfortable distance from a 17′′ monitor displaying at 800 × 600-pixel resolution and set to refresh at 85 Hz. Participants spoke into a headset microphone connected to a voice-operated relay in the response box. Materials and design One hundred and sixty 5-letter words were chosen from the British National Corpus, with a range of normative frequency from 4 to 230 per million (Kilgarriff, 1995). Unrelated primes were randomly assigned to targets, with the constraint that they shared no more than two letters in position with the target. Additional words of similar characteristics were used for six practice trials. For each trial, five different consonants (excluding Y) were selected at random for the pattern mask, which

was presented before and after the target. The targets were cycled through the 2 (prime SOAs) × 2 (prime conditions: identity vs. unrelated prime) over four lists, with each participant having four different sets of 20 targets in each of the four conditions, with no target occurring on more than one trial. The trial sequence was randomized. Procedure All words were presented in 22-point bold Times Roman font, in silver against a black background. The prime and target were presented in the centre of the screen. Each trial began with a centrally placed ready signal (+) for 500 ms, followed by the prime display consisting of a single centrally located word, at a duration of 59 ms or 506 ms. There was a pattern mask of random consonants for 24 ms immediately after the prime, after which the target was presented centrally; thus the SOAs were 83 ms and 530 ms (see Figure 1). The target duration was 118 ms, based on pilot testing indicating that this duration would produce a mean accuracy of 80%. After the offset of the posttarget pattern mask, an asterisk appeared on the screen until the microphone was activated, and the experimenter recorded accuracy and microphone failures on the keyboard. No accuracy

Figure 1. Diagram of trial events for the experiments. THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2014, 67 (10)

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feedback was given. The intertrial interval was 2000 ms, and a rest break was given every 40 test trials.


Results Participants reported that they could see letters of the prime at the short SOA but could not always identity the word. Figure 2 shows the target accuracy for the unrelated and identity prime conditions, and target latency data are shown in Figure 3. An SOA (83 vs. 530) × Prime Type (unrelated vs. identity) analysis of variance (ANOVA) confirmed effects of SOA [F1(1, 31) = 26.18, MSE = 261; F2(1, 79) = 47.81, MSE = 300], with lower accuracy at the short SOA; and prime type [F1(1, 31) = 54.24, MSE = 202; F2(1, 79) = 207.64, MSE = 363]. These effects were qualified by a significant SOA × Prime Type interaction [F1(1, 31) = 32.33, MSE = 662; F2(1, 79) = 191.13, MSE = 300]. Figure 2 clearly shows different results for the short and long SOAs. First, in line with Huber (2008), there was a priming benefit at the short SOA and no benefit at the long SOA. Second, unexpectedly, there was a substantial deficit for the unrelated prime condition at the short SOA relative to the long SOA. The latency data for correct responses were preprocessed with a cut-off of 2500 ms and then culling of latencies that fell outside 3 standard deviations above or below each participant’s mean latency within each SOA, with a total loss of

Figure 2. Experiment 1: Mean vocal identification accuracy for targets with unrelated and identity primes over the two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity.

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5.1% of trials due to microphone failures and extreme latencies. The data of six participants and 15 items were dropped because of missing data. In an SOA × Prime Type ANOVA, there was a significant SOA × Prime Type interaction [F1(1, 25) = 46.04, MSE = 22,344; F2(1, 64) = 63.17, MSE = 40,041]. The main effects of SOA and prime type were significant by items but not by participants (F1s , 1.4). Figure 3 shows that, in line with predictions, there was a repetition benefit at the short SOA and a repetition cost at the long SOA. Simple effects analysis at each SOA confirmed that both repetition effects were significant: for the benefit, F1(1, 25) = 19.80, F2(1, 64) = 12.36; for the cost, F1(1, 25) = 25.11, F2(1, 64) = 71.33.

Discussion In vocal perceptual identification with single primes and naming of a single target, the results at the longer SOA were in line with expectations based on our response bias account and broadly consistent with the idea of refractoriness (assuming that it increases with prime duration), and in clear contrast to the ubiquitous priming benefits in word naming in the lexical processing literature (Burt et al., 1996). In accuracy there was a large priming benefit at the short SOA, which was eliminated at the long SOA. The latency data provided a strong confirmation of the shift over SOA from a repetition benefit to a repetition cost, with both

Figure 3. Experiment 1: Mean vocal identification latency for targets with unrelated and identity primes over the two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity.




the repetition cost and the benefit significant. Costs of repetition have been observed in response latency in attentional tasks (Tipper, 1985) but we could find no reports of repetition costs in word identification latency in the lexical processing literature. As noted earlier, the analysis by Huber (2008) of the Ratcliff and McKoon (1997) perceptual identification task suggested that participants evaluate the relative fluency of processing of the foil and target in the choice display. The cost that we observed in target naming latencies shows that repetition costs do not require a processing-fluency comparison between the target and another candidate. Unexpectedly, there was also a severe deficit in target accuracy for the unrelated prime condition at the short relative to the longer SOA. This result presumably reflects a severe forward masking effect of the unrelated prime and its following consonant mask at the short SOA, given the placement of the prime and target in the same screen location. Participants may be more able to parse the mask and prime as separate events when the mask duration is increased. In Experiment 2 this problem was addressed by increasing the duration of the postprime mask to 59 ms and replacing the consonants of the mask with hash marks (#), to improve the prime–mask discrimination.

EXPERIMENT 2 In Experiments 2 and 3 the repetition costs were examined in the standard task used in the lexical processing literature, the lexical decision task, in which participants are asked to classify words and word-like novel letter strings as words versus nonwords. Consistent with the vocal identification task of Experiment 1 and with priming paradigms in the LDT, on each trial the prime was a single centrally located word, and a single target letter string was presented for speeded lexical decision. The LDT is commonly assumed to depend primarily upon complete identification of a target word—that is, access to its phonology and meaning. Clearly the task is also subject to decision biases—for example, in favour of a word decision if

the target word is experienced as familiar (Balota & Chumbley, 1984). Under some circumstances, the word versus nonword decision may be based on the overall amount of activation in lexical memory (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996) or pooled word probabilities (Norris, 2006). In the present experiments it was considered unlikely that participants would base their decision on global lexical activation because of its unreliability in the context of wordlike nonwords and masked targets. In generating predictions for the LDT, we assumed that confusion about the source of evidence in favour of the target at the longer SOA would cause participants to be uncertain about the target and sometimes unable to decide on a word candidate. Thus we expected to see a bias against a correct word decision (in favour of an incorrect nonword decision) on repetition priming trials and a cost in response latencies. If the refractoriness principle is used to explain repetition effects at longer SOAs, then participants should show a reduced ability to achieve a percept that corresponds to the target word. Regardless of whether there is an accuracy cost, identification of the target should be slowed. Experiment 2 examined repetition in a maskedtarget version of the LDT with the target duration set to achieve an accuracy of 80%, and latency data for correct responses were analysed. As noted above, because of severe accuracy decrements in the unrelated prime condition at the short SOA, the postprime masking procedure was changed to enhance the perceptual separation of primes and targets. In order to better track the expected transition from repetition benefits at the short SOA to costs at the longest SOA, we varied the SOA over three values (approximating 120, 410, and 710 ms). Experiment 2 also included an additional variable, the normative printed word frequency of the target words. As noted in the introduction, at moderately long SOAs in the standard (unmasked target) LDT, an interaction of priming with word frequency typically is observed, with larger priming benefits for low- than for high-frequency words (Forster & Davis, 1984). With respect to the effects of word frequency on repetition costs,


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there are some grounds for expecting a different interactive pattern—namely, a larger repetition cost for highthan for low-frequency words. For example, within our decision bias account, uncertainty about whether an identical target is a new event may be increased by word familiarity, and thus repetition costs might be seen more strongly for more familiar words. If token confusions are greater for high-frequency words, then theories attributing repetition costs to tokenization failures would predict an effect of word frequency on repetition blindness (RB). There is limited information on whether RB is greater for highthan for low-frequency words, with one study finding no effect (Bavelier, Prasada, & Segui, 1994), but some positive evidence being obtained in the present laboratory (Howard & Burt, 2010). Additionally, Huber, Clark, Curran, and Winkielman (2008) observed differences in episodic recognition as a function of study time (and thus episodic familiarity) for words preceded by identity primes at test (cf. Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). The authors suggested that a familiar word should show a faster rise and a faster decline in refractoriness than a less familiar word. Although short-term effects of study duration on familiarity are not the same as preexisting stable differences in word familiarity, arguably the effects on refractoriness will be similar for the two kinds of familiarity. Specifically, high-frequency target words might show repetition costs at a shorter SOA than low-frequency targets. In summary, in Experiment 2 with briefly displayed masked targets, we expected to see a repetition benefit at a short SOA and repetition costs at longer SOAs. Repetition benefits were expected to be greater for low-frequency words, and perhaps repetition costs would be greater for high-frequency words. The costs were predicted on the basis of the decision bias described previously. That is, participants infer that they have misidentified the target as the prime when there uncertainty about the target together with evidence that the target was the same as a clearly identified prime. A change from repetition benefits to costs with increasing SOA would also be consistent with a refractoriness account of repetition costs.

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Method Participants Twenty-four Introductory Psychology university students (12 women) participated for course credit. Their mean age was 22.4 years (range 17–47). Materials and design The word targets were 96 four-letter and 96 fiveletter words. Within each length and based on the British National Corpus (Kilgarriff, 1995), half were high in normative frequency, at least 100 per million (mean = 339), and half were low in frequency, a range of 1 to 10 (mean = 4.33). Each target was assigned a frequency- and length-matched unrelated prime that shared no more than one letter in position. One hundred and ninety-two pronounceable nonwords (half four letters and half five letters) were allocated orthographic neighbour word primes sharing all but one letter (e.g., WOOL–WOON) and having a mean frequency of 30 per million (Kilgarriff, 1995). The neighbour primes were re-paired with targets to produce the unelated prime condition. We restricted primes to words so that prime lexicality could be unconfounded from target lexicality without adding a large number of trials. Participants could use the prime–target relationship (similar vs. identical) to help with their decision, especially in the long SOA condition, but this effect would work against predictions. Additional words and nonwords were used for 12 practice trials. Items were rotated through 2 (prime type: identity/similar vs. unrelated) × 3 (SOA) conditions over six lists, with equal numbers of four-letter and five-letter targets in each condition. There were 32 nonword targets per cell and 16 highand 16 low-frequency word targets per cell. Each prime and target was seen in only one condition in each list. The six conditions were randomly intermixed within each list, and the practice trials were added to the beginning of each list. Procedure The procedure was the same as that in the vocal perceptual identification task of Experiment 1




with the following exceptions (see Figure 1). All letter strings were displayed in white upper-case font. The prime durations were 59, 353, and 647 ms. After each prime there was a presentation of a mask consisting of six hash-marks (######) for 59 ms, yielding SOAs approximating 120, 410, and 710 ms. The target duration was 141 ms, determined on the basis of pilot testing to achieve 80% accuracy. The trials including practice were presented in six blocks of 66 trials each. Participants rested the left and right index fingers on the left and right buttons (respectively) of a response box connected to the games port of the computer. They were instructed to decide as quickly and accurately as possible whether the letter string was a word or not and to press the right button for words and the left for nonwords. The reverse allocation was made for left-handed participants. Accuracy feedback (correct vs. incorrect) was given after each trial.

Results The lexical decision (LD) accuracy data for word targets are shown in Figure 4. An SOA (120 vs. 410 vs. 710 ms) × Prime Type (identity vs. unrelated) ANOVA was conducted, with Greenhouse–Geisser corrections if they affected results when Mauchly’s test of sphericity was significant. There was a main effect of target frequency, with accuracy higher for high-frequency

Figure 4. Experiment 2: Mean lexical decision accuracy for masked targets with unrelated and identity primes over the three stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). LDT = lexical decision task; Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity; LF = low frequency; HF = high frequency.

targets [F1(1, 23) = 14.76, MSE = 158; F2(1, 190) = 15.10, MSE = 567], and a main effect of prime type (ps , .005). The prime type effect was qualified by an interaction of Target Frequency × Prime Type [F1(1, 23) = 17.15, MSE = 153; F2(1, 190) = 23.43, MSE = 347], reflecting a larger total repetition cost for high-frequency than low-frequency targets. Critically, the differential effect of repetition over SOAs was confirmed by a Prime Type × SOA interaction [F1(2, 46) = 31.22, MSE = 294; F2(2, 380) = 74.02, MSE = 412]. The direction of the repetition effect reversed from a benefit at the short SOA to a cost at the other SOAs. There three-way interaction was not significant (F1, F2 , 1). Follow-up analyses at each SOA indicated that the repetition cost was significant at both the medium and long SOAs (F1, F2 . 17.00) and that there was a significant Target Frequency × Prime Type interaction at the both the medium SOA [F1(1, 23) = 4.80; F2(1, 190) = 5.28], and the long SOA [F1(1, 23) = 12.39; F2(1, 190) = 7.20], reflecting a larger repetition cost for highthan for low-frequency targets. At the short SOA the Target Frequency × Prime Type interaction was the only significant effect [F1(1, 23) = 12.34; F2(1, 190) = 8.55], reflecting facilitation for low- but not for high-frequency targets. There was no other effect that was significant by both participants and items. The latency data were preprocessed as for the vocal latencies of Experiment 1, with a loss of 1.9% of word and nonword trials as extreme latencies. The mean latencies for words are shown in Figure 5. The data of two participants and 11 high-frequency and 12 low-frequency targets were removed from analyses because of missing data. An SOA × Target Frequency × Prime Type ANOVA confirmed a main effect of prime type (ps , .05) that was qualified by an SOA × Prime Type interaction [F1(2, 21) = 11.49, MSE = 25,802; F2(2, 334) = 11.98, MSE = 26,331]. The Prime Type × Target Frequency interaction, reflecting a larger repetition cost for highthan for low-frequency targets, was significant by participants and approached significance by items [F1(1, 21) = 9.33, MSE = 6123; F2(1, 167) =


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Figure 5. Experiment 2: Mean lexical decision (LD) latency for masked targets with unrelated and identity primes over the three stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity; LF = low frequency; HF = high frequency.

3.41, p = .07]. The three-way interaction was not significant. Separate analyses at each SOA revealed that the priming facilitation at the short SOA was significant [F1(1, 21) = 6.41; F2(1, 168) = 5.14], and the repetition cost at the long SOA was also significant [F1(1, 21) = 15.75; F2(1, 168) = 19.15], while the repetition cost at the medium SOA approached significance only [F1(1, 21) = 3.08, p = .09; F2(1, 168) = 3.50, p = .06]. The Target Frequency × Prime Type interaction was not significant by both participants and items at any of the three SOAs taken separately (Figure 5). The nonword data were analysed by SOA × Prime Type (similar vs. unrelated word). ANOVAs, by participants only. The accuracy and latency data are shown in Table 1. In the accuracy Table 1. Experiment 2: Mean lexical decision latencies and percentage correct for nonword targets in the LDT test as a function of SOA and prime type Prime type Unrelated word

Similar word

SOA (ms)

Latencies (ms)

Accuracy (%)

Latencies (ms)

Accuracy (%)

120 410 710

965 937 958

52 66 66

989 909 923

48 71 75

Note: LDT = lexical decision task; SOA = stimulus onset asynchrony.

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analysis there was a main effect of SOA, F1(1, 23) = 20.25, MSE = 301, and an SOA × Prime Type interaction, F1(1, 23) = 4.61, MSE = 108. These results reflected a severe decrement in accuracy at the short SOA and similar-word priming facilitation at the two longer SOAs but not at the short SOA. Simple effects of prime type at each SOA revealed that only the facilitation at the long SOA was significant, F1(1, 23) = 5.67. The latency data (for the 22 participants providing word latency data) showed a pattern consistent with the accuracy data, but only the main effect of SOA was significant, F1(1, 21) = 4.24, MSE = 7905.

Discussion At the short SOA of 120 ms the accuracy for unrelated-word targets was not substantially lower at the short SOA than at other SOAs, indicating that the changes made to reduce severe forward masking effects by the prime and its mask at the short SOA were successful, at least for word targets. Experiment 2 confirmed that identity primes produce a shift from facilitation to a cost in the masked-target LDT when SOAs (and corresponding prime durations) extend to approximately half a second. Priming facilitation was observed at the short SOA in the latency data and in the accuracy data for low-frequency targets. At the longest SOA of 710 ms there was a marked repetition cost in both accuracy and latency data for both high- and low-frequency targets. At the intermediate SOA of 410 ms there was also a robust repetition cost in the accuracy data. The cost of repetition in accuracy at the two longer SOAs was significantly greater for highthan for low-frequency targets, consistent with the proposal that high-frequency targets are more vulnerable to token confusions or refractoriness. In the latency data there was some evidence of a frequency modulation of the transition from a repetition benefit at the shorter SOA to a cost at the medium SOA, in that there was a repetition cost for high-frequency targets and no effect for lowfrequency targets at the medium SOA. However, a limitation was that although the Target




Frequency × Prime Type interaction in the latency data was significant by participants at the medium SOA, the interaction did not approach significance by items. The priming facilitation observed in latencies at the short SOA is broadly consistent with evidence in the lexical processing literature with unmasked targets (Forster & Davis, 1984). In relation to the nonsignificant interaction of priming with target frequency, we were unable to find LD studies in which frequency was varied at a comparable SOA. For accuracy, priming facilitation in accuracy was expected for both high- and low-frequency masked targets, given that accuracy was well below 100%. It is possible that the failure of high-frequency targets to show a priming benefit in accuracy at the short SOA indicates that the shift to a repetition cost occurred earlier than at the medium SOA for these targets. However, the facilitation for high-frequency targets in the latency data at the short SOA is not consistent with this possibility. It is more likely that with the current display and target duration it was difficult for participants to achieve more than 80% correct target identifications. The nonword data were surprising in that regardless of prime type, accuracy was low at the short SOA, and latencies were longer than at the other SOAs. It appears that given the absence of type activation for nonword targets (which have no lexical representations), and perhaps a tendency to combine prime and target information, the prime exerted a substantial influence in favour of an incorrect word decision at the short SOA. The implication for word targets is that such a bias may have contributed to the repetition benefit for words at the short SOA. However, it is unlikely to have been a major factor in facilitation because for high-frequency targets, a bias to guess a word would inflate accuracy regardless of any ceiling on identification ability (estimated to be at 80%). However, as noted, high-frequency targets showed no repetition benefit in accuracy at the short SOA. With respect to priming effects for nonwords, similar-word primes produced a modest facilitation in accuracy at the two longer SOAs. For nonwords

a significant source of repetition costs is absent on both refractory and tokenization accounts because nonwords do not have preexisting lexical representations and processing pathway to be habituated or activated. The most parsimonious account of the nonword results at the longer SOAs is that participants were biased against the similar-word prime (and thus in favour of a correct nonword decision) at the longer SOAs. Participants’ learning that similar but not identical primes were presented only with nonword targets may have supported this bias. In Experiment 3 we included a small number of nonword targets paired with nonword primes.

EXPERIMENT 3 Experiment 3 addressed the discrepancy between the present results and the universal finding of repetition facilitation in the lexical decision task (e.g., Monsell, 1991). As noted already, we hypothesized that uncertainty about the targets, produced by brief target displays with backward pattern masking, is critical to the repetition costs observed at longer SOAs here and in the two-choice perceptual identification task (Huber, 2008; Huber et al., 2002; Weidemann et al., 2005, 2008). We hypothesized that when the prime was clearly available as a separate event, and there was uncertainty about the target, then participants would show a kind of token confusion: Was the target a new occurrence of the prime word or was what I saw as the target merely a continuation of the prime? If the procedure is changed so that both the prime and the target are unmasked, the participant can more easily be sure that the target is a second occurrence of the prime, and we expected the repetition cost to be replaced by a repetition benefit. On the idea of lexical refractoriness, it is not clear why repetition costs might be observed with brief masked targets but not when targets are presented in the clear. Importantly, given that refractoriness is incurred during prime processing, then the characteristics of target displays and response requirements cannot affect the amount of refractoriness in the lexical representation of the repeated


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target. It is possible that the effects of refractoriness on target identification and on the consequent lexical decision can be compensated for when the target is presented in the clear. Participants will have sufficient time to process the target without difficulty and thus can be expected to show high accuracy. However, in this case, it is plausible to expect a lengthening of response latencies for repeated targets. Furthermore, any repetition benefit in response latencies to unmasked targets is unlikely to reflect combining the prime and target as a single event, as has been suggest for effects at short SOAs. A benefit must result from processes other than refractoriness, such as lingering excitatory activation in the lexical pathways (cf. Huber, 2008). In Experiment 3, participants made lexical decisions to masked or unmasked high- and lowfrequency targets, which followed an identity or unrelated prime at a longer SOA (530 ms). The mask separating the prime and target was the 24-ms consonant mask used in Experiment 1, which had no detrimental effects on target identification at longer SOAs. It was predicted that unmasked targets would show the effects typical of the lexical processing literature—namely, priming facilitation in response latencies, and a Prime Type × Target Frequency interaction, with a larger priming benefit for low- than for high-frequency words. With masked targets we predicted a repetition cost, in line with the results of Experiment 2 at SOAs of 410 and 710 ms. We expected the accuracy cost to be most evident for high-frequency words, as was observed in accuracy at the medium and long SOAs of Experiment 2. The contrasting prediction for a refractoriness account of repetition effects at longer SOAs is a cost, at least in response latencies, in both tasks.

Method Participants Thirty-six Introductory Psychology students of mean age 19 years (range 17 to 28; 23 women) participated for course credit. Twenty-four completed the masked-target task first or as their only task. Half of them completed the unmasked task

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second. The remaining 12 participants completed only the unmasked-target task. There was no difference in the results for the unmasked task between the subgroups who had versus had not completed the masked task first. Materials and design The word targets were 144 five-letter words, 72 high frequency, at least 1 per million in the British National Corpus (Kilgarriff, 1995), with a mean of 311, and the remainder low frequency, in the range 1–10 per million in the same corpus, with a mean of 4.2. Each target had an unrelated prime matched on frequency and length that shared no more than two letters in position. An additional 20 filler words covering a large frequency range were used (10 per task) with unrelated pronounceable nonword primes. There were 164 pronounceable five-letter nonword targets, each of which had a one-letter-different word (mean frequency 29 per million). The nonword targets were divided into four sets of 36 and two sets of 10. Two sets of 36 were paired similar-word primes, two sets of 36 with unrelated-word primes, and the two sets of 10 were paired with their targets as identity primes. Assignment of nonwords to prime conditions was partially counterbalanced. An additional 16 words and 16 nonwords were selected for eight practice trials per task. Word and nonword targets were counterbalanced over the masked- and unmasked-target tasks, so that participants doing both tasks had different item sets for the two tasks. One item set had the first 82 nonwords and the first 36 words in each frequency set, and the remainder had the second word and nonword sets. For each task, two versions of each item set were produced in which the assignment of word targets to prime type was counterbalanced. Each list for each task had 18 words from each frequency set in the identity and unrelated prime conditions, plus 36 nonword targets with similar-word primes, 36 nonword targets with unrelated-word primes, 10 nonwords with identity primes, and 10 filler word targets with unrelated nonword primes. The sequence of 164 trials was randomized, and 8 practice trials were placed at the beginning of the list.




Masked targets The accuracy data for the word targets in the masked task are shown in the left panel of Figure 6. A Target Frequency × Prime Type ANOVA revealed main effects of target frequency, with an advantage for high over low frequency [F1(1, 23 = 20.40, MSE = 128; F2(1, 142) = 20.29, MSE = 385]. There was also a large repetition cost, confirmed by a main effect of prime type [F1(1, 23) = 23.25, MSE = 1069; F2(1, 142) = 231.43, MSE = 322]. The interaction of these factors was also significant, reflecting a

larger repetition cost for highthan for low-frequency targets [F1(1, 23) = 10.51, MSE = 70; F2(1, 142) = 6.90, MSE = 322]. The left panel of Figure 7 shows the latency data for the masked-target task. The latency data were preprocessed as in Experiment 2 with a loss of 1.8% of nonfiller-word and nonword trials due to extreme latencies. Four targets were lost from the item analysis because of empty cells. A Target Frequency × Prime Type ANOVA revealed that the tendency for latencies to be shorter for high-frequency targets was significant only by participants, F1(1, 23) = 4.64, MSE = 13,556, F2(1, 138) = 2.48, MSE = 31,334, p = .12. There was a main effect of prime type, reflecting a repetition cost, F1(1, 23) = 9.83, MSE = 27,946, F2(1, 138) = 14.04, MSE = 31,296. There was no interaction (F1, F2 , 1). The nonword data for the masked-target task are shown in Table 2. A prime type ANOVA on target accuracy confirmed a significant advantage in accuracy for targets with identity and similar primes relative to unrelated primes, F1(2, 46) = 20.39, MSE = 142. Additionally, accuracy was lower in the similar-word prime than in the identity condition, as confirmed in a follow-up test, F1(1, 23) = 6.35. The latency data were preprocessed as in Experiment 2. The prime type ANOVA showed no significant effect, F1(1, 23) = 193, MSE = 10,717, p = .16.

Figure 6. Experiment 3: Mean lexical decision accuracy at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 530 ms for targets with identical and unrelated primes in the masked- versus unmaskedtarget task. LDT = lexical decision task; Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity; LF = low frequency; HF = high frequency.

Figure 7. Experiment 3: Mean lexical decision (LD) latency at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 530 ms for targets with identical and unrelated primes in the masked- versus unmaskedtarget task. Unrel = unrelated; ID = identity; LF = low frequency; HF = high frequency.

Procedure Letter strings were displayed in upper case in silver on a back background, in Times Roman 22-point font, as in Experiment 1. The events on each trial were the same as those in Experiment 1 with respect to the ready signal, postprime random consonant mask for 24 ms, posttarget random consonant mask, and accuracy feedback. The prime was a single letter-string displayed in the centre of the screen for 506 ms, and the SOA was 530 ms. The target duration was 141 ms, and participants made speeded lexical decisions to targets as in Experiment 2 (see Figure 1). The trials were presented in three blocks of 58.

Results


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Table 2. Experiment 3: Mean lexical decision latencies and percentage correct for nonword targets in the LDT test as a function of task and prime type Prime type Unrelated word Task Masked target Unmasked target

Similar word

Identity

Latencies (ms)

Accuracy (%)

Latencies (ms)

Accuracy (%)

Latencies (ms)

Accuracy (%)

1028 798

59 90

973 813

73 92

981 725

81 92


Note: LDT = lexical decision task.

Unmasked targets For the unmasked-target task, as noted, preliminary analyses revealed similar results for the subgroups that had and had not completed the masked task first, and their data were pooled for analyses. The accuracy data for word targets in the unmasked task are shown in the right panel of Figure 6. A Target Frequency × Prime Type ANOVA showed that the main effect of frequency was significant, with accuracy higher for high-frequency targets [F1(1, 23) = 42.57, MSE = 43; F2(1, 142) = 32.38, MSE = 168]. The tendency for identity primes to enhance target accuracy was marginally significant by participants and significant by items [F1(1, 23) = 3.83, MSE = 61, p = .06; F2(1, 142) = 4.87, MSE = 144]. There was no interaction (F1, F2 , 1). The latency data were preprocessed as in Experiment 2, with a loss of 2.5% due to extreme latencies for word targets (excluding fillers) and nonword targets. The latencies for words are shown in Figure 7. A Target Frequency × Prime Type ANOVA showed, as for the accuracy data, main effects of target frequency and prime type, and no interaction of these factors. Specifically, high-frequency targets were classified more quickly than low-frequency targets, F1(1, 23) = 40.68, MSE = 1868, F2(1, 142) = 17.52, MSE = 16,153. Identity primes facilitated target decisions, F1(1, 23) = 44.72, MSE = 5859, F2(1, 142) = 82.98, MSE = 10,850. The facilitation tended to be larger for low- than for high-frequency targets (126 vs. 94 ms), but not significantly so (Fs , 1.6 for the interaction).

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The nonword data for the unmasked targets, shown in Table 2, were subjected to a one-way ANOVA by prime type. There was no effect of prime type in the accuracy data (F1 , 1). There was a significant effect of prime type in the latency data, with faster responses in the identity prime condition, F1(2, 46) = 7.99, MSE = 6648. Comparison of the unrelated- and similar-word prime conditions showed a marginally significant disadvantage for the similar-word condition, F1(1, 23) = 4.24, MSE = 685, p = .051.

Discussion The comparison of the unmasked- and maskedtarget tasks in Experiment 3 largely supported our predictions and did not provide any support for the idea that refractoriness is the sole explanation of repetition effects at longer SOAs. Although the masked-target task replicated the repetition cost in accuracy and latencies observed at the medium and long SOAs of Experiment 2, the unmasked-target task showed facilitation in response latencies, with a similar trend in the accuracy data. Target frequency interacted with the repetition cost in accuracy for masked targets, with a larger cost for high-frequency targets, as in Experiment 2. In the unmasked-target task the priming facilitation in latencies was expected to be larger for low-frequency targets, in line with research in the lexical processing literature. Although there was a trend in this direction, the Target Frequency × Prime Type interaction was not significant.




The response latencies were substantially longer (mean of 281 ms) in the masked-target task than in the unmasked task. This result may reflect the difficulty of target identification in the masked-target task, but also suggests that participants do not attempt to execute their responses prior to the termination of the posttarget mask. With respect to the nonword data, in the masked-target task, the unrelated-word prime condition for the nonword data showed lower accuracy than in the longer SOA conditions of Experiment 2. This result may reflect more severe forward masking effects of the prime and postprime mask (24 ms consonant string) in the present experiment than in Experiment 2, in which better separation of prime and target may have been achieved with the 59-ms pattern mask (######). There was also a significant similar-word priming benefit of 14% points. As suggested in Experiment 2, participants may have been biased against the similar-word prime and thus more likely to make a correct nonword decision. The inclusion of a small number of identity (nonword) prime trials may have been insufficient to discourage this strategy. The new result in Experiment 3 was a repetition benefit, with accuracy higher after identity (nonword) primes than after similar and unrelated-word primes. Given that a bias against the identical nonword prime would have decreased accuracy by increasing the percentage of word decisions, this result must have a different explanation from that offered for similar-word primes. The identity of the prime and target may have enhanced accuracy by clarifying the perceptual or orthographic information about the target. Arguably the shared letters between word primes and nonword targets in the similar condition also facilitated the processing of the target, and this facilitation was responsible for the priming benefit observed in nonword-target accuracy here and in Experiment 2. However, if this were the case, it is unclear why there was no priming benefit for nonwords at the short SOA in Experiment 2. The accuracy data in the unmasked-target task showed no effect of prime type for nonword targets, supporting our argument that bias effects depending on uncertainty about the target were

responsible for the accuracy costs incurred by similar-word primes in the masked-target task in Experiments 2 and 3. Consistent with the accuracy results for the masked targets, identity primes facilitated responses to nonword targets in the latency data. Similar-word primes tended to produce a latency cost, perhaps because participants sometimes made an orthographic check before responding when a nonword target was similar to a word prime. Taken together, the results for word targets suggest that masking of the target is critical to the repetition costs found in the perceptual identification task. The results for the unmasked task were in line with those typically found in the LDT in the lexical processing literature, with the exception that the tendency for low-frequency targets to show larger repetition benefits in latencies was not significant. If word refractoriness is produced by long-duration primes, then it is surprising that there is no repetition cost with unmasked targets, at least in response latencies, particularly when such a cost was observed in Experiments 1 and 2. In order to explain the present results, models incorporating refractoriness must appeal to other aspects of lexical processing that might be affected by the procedural differences between masked and unmasked tasks.

GENERAL DISCUSSION Overview With upper-case primes and targets, in the latency data for vocal perceptual identification (Experiment 1) and in accuracy and latency in the lexical decision task with masked targets (Experiments 2 and 3), identity primes at SOAs of 410 ms or more produced costs, in line with the results of Huber and colleagues (2008). There were two important additions in the present experiments: The shift over SOA from repetition benefits to costs was confirmed in the response latency data and in analyses by items. Otherwise, the most significant new information provided by the present experiments was that (a) with unmasked targets in the LDT,


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the identity repetition cost became a priming benefit (Experiment 3), in line with findings in the lexical processing literature; (b) at longer SOAs with masked nonword targets there was a small accuracy benefit of identical or similar-word primes (Experiments 2 and 3); and (c) there was evidence that repetition costs for high-frequency words are larger than those for low-frequency words (Experiments 2 and 3). With respect to the LDT, it was argued that participants would make their lexical decisions primarily on the basis of an attempt to uniquely identify the target, rather than using a global estimate of lexical activity (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996) or pooled word probabilities (Norris, 2006). If participants were making use of a global decision criterion, their responses may be influenced by the similarity of targets to other words, indexed by the number of one-letter-different orthographic neighbours. Analyses of the data for masked targets in Experiments 2 and 3 as a function of the neighbourhood size (N; 6 or more vs. 0–2 neighbours) showed that LDT accuracy tended to be higher and latencies shorter for high-frequency high-N words, perhaps indicating that overall lexical activity or probability was affecting decisions. However, in line with expectations that repetition effects are not realized through effects on global estimates of “wordness” in the LDT, there were no interactions of the neighbour variable with repetition.

Refractoriness in lexical representations Some aspects of the present results are not problematic for the general idea of lexical refractoriness. These include the repetition costs at longer SOAs and facilitation at short SOAs observed with masked targets, and the absence of a repetition cost for nonword stimuli in the LDT, which can be attributed to the fact that nonwords do not have lexical representations. The evidence concerning word frequency requires clarification, in particular with respect to the time course of the resolution of costs as a function of word frequency. However, the frequency results potentially could be explained by Huber’s (2008) habituation model,

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which assumes earlier refractoriness for familiar words. The problem for a refractoriness account of repetition effects at long SOAs is that it does not explain the dependence of costs on uncertainty about the target (i.e., target duration and masking). In contrast to the situation with brief backward-masked targets in the LDT, longer duration unmasked targets not only failed to produce repetition costs, but also produced substantial repetition benefits in response latencies. One possibility is to suppose that repetition or prime similarity at a long SOA produces a cost in word identification, but a substantial benefit in the decision about the target word (i.e., word vs. nonword decision). There are some problems with this account. First, to explain the present results it would be necessary to assume that the decision benefit does not apply, or is much smaller, when the target is masked. Second, it is well established that at longer SOAs, identity primes produce facilitation in the word naming task, which does not have a decision component (Burt et al., 1996). It is acknowledged that models incorporating mechanisms additional to refractoriness can explain these results. For example, Huber’s (2008) habituation model can explain the effect of target masking if it is assumed that participants wait to respond until after the presentation of the posttarget mask. The mask serves to wipe out lingering activation from prime processing, which would otherwise counteract refractoriness sufficiently to produce repetition benefits (Huber, personal communication, August, 2013).

Alternative approaches: Repetition facilitates lexical processing The traditional views in the lexical processing literature are (a) that identifying a word makes its representation more accessible for a brief period, (b) that this increased accessibility is an automatic side-effect of lexical processing, and (c) that this increased accessibility produces a repetition benefit in naming and lexical decision tasks, although there may be a contribution of additional




(e.g., episodic) factors not encompassed by traditional theories of lexical processing and priming effects. The present view is that the traditional accounts are sufficient for understanding how repetition affects lexical processes, and that the cost produced by an identity prime in target word identification is an artefact arising in conditions promoting confusion between the prime and target events. We propose that the cost would be abolished or substantially reduced by decreasing the perceptual similarity of the prime and target. For example, as is typical in the lexical processing literature, primes and targets might be displayed in different letter cases (Forster & Davis, 1984). The primary evidence for the idea of increased accessibility, rather than refractoriness, comes from the almost ubiquitous beneficial priming effects in the lexical decision and naming tasks. Identity primes universally facilitate responses to unmasked targets, and facilitation is frequently reported also for associatively related primes (Neely, 1991) and phonologically and orthographically similar primes (McQueen & Sereno, 2005). It is tempting to conclude that identifying a word increases activation of both its lexical representation and the representations of words with which it shares features or is associatively linked. However, it must be acknowledged that in many identity priming experiments, primes and targets are clearly visible, and the nature of the prime– target relationship is highly salient. Typically 50% of the word trials involve an identity prime or repetition. Participants may be biased to decide that the target is the same as the prime and show a consequent facilitation in naming or lexical decisions to the target. Manipulation of the relative proportions of related- and unrelated-prime trials is a commonly used method to control strategic effects, on the rationale that the salience of the prime–target relationship and the utility of predictive strategies are reduced when the related proportion is low. While it is clear that high relatedness proportion does increase both associative and identity priming effects in naming and the LDT (Burt et al., 1996; den Heyer, Briand, & Smith, 1985; Keefe & Neely, 1990; Tweedy, Lapinski, &

Schvaneveldt, 1977), the critical question is whether priming effects are observed in the lowproportion condition. With respect to identity priming, there is little evidence, but facilitation has been observed in the naming task with an identity proportion of 17% at a long SOA (Burt et al., 1996) and 25% at a short SOA (Ferguson, Robidoux, & Besner, 2009). In sum, while it is not possible to definitively conclude that identity priming facilitation in the naming and LDT arises as a typical consequence of reading the prime word, the evidence is suggestive that this is the case.

The repetition cost reflects a bias against the prime The dependence of repetition costs on a brief target duration and target masking is easily explained by our hypothesis that in conditions of uncertainty about the target, participants are biased against a repeated prime at longer SOAs. Participants have strong perceptual evidence that the target was the prime word, but in the absence of an episodic record of the target, they cannot be sure whether the prime was the source of the perceptual evidence. In principle, participants are required to use only the activation of the target’s lexical representation (the type) to make their response. However, because participants are uncertain about the target, they base their responses on attempts to establish a token of the target. We assume that the bias against the prime counteracts the facilitatory effect of the prime that is otherwise observed. When the target is unmasked, there is little or no uncertainty about the target, and no bias applies (cf. Howard & Burt, 2010). At both short and long SOAs, regardless of whether the prime is tokenized, the word to which the participants must respond, the unmasked target, is clearly established as an event that can be reported. In the LDT the requirement that participants make a binary decision can be expected to increase the vulnerability to bias effects. Consistent with this idea, the accuracy data for the vocal perceptual identification task showed only a reduction in repetition benefits at the long SOA rather than the


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repetition cost observed in the LDT. Note also that the magnitude of the repetition costs observed in the present experiments was larger than that in the experiment of Huber (2008), which had two different prime words. In fact, in the doubleprime paradigm used by Huber in his second experiment there was a reduction in facilitation rather than a repetition cost, perhaps because the second prime word for the target-primed conditions is an unrelated word that does not appear in the test display. On our decision-bias view, the presence of the additional unrelated word in the prime display may help the participant to separate the prime and target events. Our account is somewhat similar to existing models of decision bias such as the Responding Optimally with Unknown Sources of Evidence (ROUSE) model (Huber et al., 2001) that preceded the development of the habituation model. However, unlike decisional bias models, we assume that repetition benefits result at least in part from facilitation of lexical processing rather than decisional effects. We locate the decision bias and resulting costs in the broader context of difficulties with event segregation when perceptual information is limited, or when there is confusion about how to respond to changes in task roles over repetitions of events (Milliken et al., 1998; Neill, Valdes, Terry, & Gorfein, 1992). Such difficulties can be found in literature on the RB (Coltheart, 2010), negative priming (Milliken & Lupianez, 2007), and the attentional blink, a deficit in finding a second in an RSVP stream of targets among distractors (Wyble, Potter, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2011). A question that remains is why costs with masked targets were larger for high-frequency words. In order to explain the larger repetition cost for high-frequency targets, it must be assumed that the decision bias at longer SOAs is exacerbated for these words. For example, the high perceptual fluency of high-frequency words and their familiarity outside the experimental context may exacerbate the decision bias. Participants may be uncertain whether a highly familiar prime is familiar because it was seen recently in the experiment or elsewhere. By

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contrast, the episodic distinctiveness of a low-frequency word is higher (Glanzer & Bowles, 1976). Thus stronger repetition costs for high-frequency words may be explained within a decision-bias account. There was limited evidence that the cost for higher frequency targets occurs earlier (i.e., at a shorter SOA), in that the cost in latencies was selective for high-frequency words at the intermediate SOA in Experiment 2, but only in the participants analysis. If replicable, this result might be explained within the response bias framework in terms of the faster identification of high-frequency primes. That is, the more secure the identification of the prime, the higher the probability of a decision bias. The interactive effects of frequency with the repetition cost may indicate, alternatively, that at longer SOAs there is a compensatory priming benefit in lexical processing, which is less important for highthan for low-frequency words. To make this account workable, the hypothesized bias against the prime cannot increase continually as activation of the target type node increases, otherwise the priming benefit would be counteracted by an increase in bias. Clearly it is premature to develop accounts of the frequency effects without additional evidence documenting the frequency effects in the masked-target LDT.

Independent evidence for the decision bias versus refractoriness There are a number of manipulations that might be used in future experiments to provide tests of the bias account versus ideas based on refractoriness. First of all, in the present experiments we followed Huber (2008) in confounding prime duration and SOA. These temporal parameters are conducive to the decision bias, in that confusion between the prime and target is maximal when the prime duration is long, and the interval between prime offset and target onset (the interstimulus interval, ISI) is short. Variation in the ISI for a given prime duration may distinguish refractoriness from our decision bias account, in that small increases in the ISI following long-duration




primes might attenuate the decision bias without substantially affecting refractoriness. The rationale is that if participants experience a clear temporal gap between prime and target, their ability to keep the two events separate should be enhanced. Second, manipulations of the perceptual distinctiveness of the prime and target can be expected to reduce the decision bias, but have only a small effect on refractoriness. Third, although tokenization of the target appears to be required in the LDT tasks devised here, it is possible that participants could be induced to make their decisions based on total activation in the lexical system (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996) or estimates of pooled word probability (Norris, 2006). For example, nonword targets could be made less word-like. If participants used a global basis for their decision, tokenization of the target would not be required, and repetition benefits would be expected. Additional information on the utility of tokenization difficulty as a driver of decision biases comes from the existing literature on related phenomena such as RB. Type-token confusions are the basis of traditional accounts of RB (Kanwisher, 1987), and they have some overlap with the decision bias favoured here. Park and Kanwisher (1994) found that an increase in the duration of the second presentation of the repeated word, but not an increase in the duration of the first presentation, attenuated the RB. This result may indicate that increasing the duration of the second presentation assists in its tokenization as an event separate from the prior occurrence. Finally, the present results bear directly on a controversy about a key manipulation for differentiating refractoriness-based accounts from other accounts of the RB. On theories that attribute the RB to refractoriness (Luo & Caramazza, 1995), RB should be observed when participants are required to report only the second occurrence of a repeated word (but see Huber, 2008). On the other hand, facilitation or no effect is predicted by the traditional type-token theory of RB (Kanwisher, 1987), because it assumes that repetition facilitates word identification. Unfortunately, the evidence is inconsistent, with facilitation reported by

Kanwisher (1987) but RB by others (Hochhaus & Marohn, 1991; Luo & Caramazza, 1995). The present results clarify this issue, because they show the importance of target uncertainty and prime duration. It appears that the failures to replicate Kanwisher’s priming facilitation may have occurred because in the later studies the target duration was shorter, and the RSVP stream was replaced by one clearly visible unmasked prime, thus increasing the kind of token confusions thought to occur here.

Conclusion The key result of the present studies is that the repetition costs observed in perceptual identification are not due to the use a choice task or the three presentations of the target on identity trials in the Ratcliff and McKoon (1997) paradigm. The costs depend upon the brief masked presentation of the target. Accounts of long-SOA repetition effects based only on refractoriness cannot explain why the conditions of presentation of the target should affect costs, because refractoriness is incurred prior to target presentation, during processing of the prime. Models that have both excitatory and refractory processes can potentially explain the results in terms of the interplay of refractoriness and activation of processing pathways (cf. Huber, 2008). However, there is no need to invoke refractoriness to explain the repetition costs observed in masked-target tasks. The costs can be explained in terms of decision biases arising due to uncertainty about the target and confusion about whether evidence in favour of the identical target should be attributed to the identical prime. The idea that there is no lexical refractoriness accords with the traditional view that a recently identified word undergoes a temporary increase in accessibility. Easier access of a word that has just been heard, spoken, read, or written may enhance the efficiency of communication and has no obvious disadvantages. Furthermore, this idea allows a coherent account of the diverse priming benefits demonstrated in the lexical decision and naming tasks.


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Original manuscript received 20 June 2013 Accepted revision received 29 December 2013 First published online 20 March 2014


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2009

Words translated in sentence contexts produce repetition priming in visual word comprehension and spoken word production.

Abstractionist versus episodic theories of repetition priming and word identification.

Adults' word recall and word repetition.

Reduced repetition suppression in the occipital visual cortex during repeated negative Chinese personality-trait word processing.

Emotional arousal enhances word repetition priming.

Repetition reduction during word and concept overlap in bilinguals.

Visual and phonological codes in repetition blindness.

Effects of exact repetition and conceptual repetition on free recall and primed word-fragment completion.

Clinical governance: costs and benefits.

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Discovery and expository methods in teaching visual consonant and word identification.

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