When less is more: feedback, priming, and the pseudoword superiority effect.

The present study combined masked priming with electrophysiological recordings to investigate orthographic priming effects with nonword targets. Targets were pronounceable nonwords (e.g., STRENG) or consonant strings (e.g., STRBNG), that both differed from a real word by a single letter substitution (STRONG). Targets were preceded by related primes that could be the same as the target (e.g., streng-STRENG, strbng-STRBNG) or the real word neighbor of the target (e.g., strong-STRENG, strong-STRBNG). Independently of priming, pronounceable nonwords were associated with larger negativities than consonant strings, starting at 290ms post-target onset. Overall, priming effects were stronger and longer-lasting with pronounceable nonwords than consonant strings. However, consonant string targets showed an early effect of word neighbor priming in the absence of an effect of repetition priming, whereas pronounceable nonwords showed both repetition and word neighbor priming effects in the same time window. This pattern of priming effects is taken as evidence for feedback from whole-word orthographic representations activated by the prime stimulus that influences bottom-up processing of prelexical representations during target processing.