Phonological Encoding in Reading Aloud Persian: ERP Evidence for the Phonological Basis of the Masked Onset Priming Effect

The current study investigates reading aloud (i.e. pronouncing) words in Persian, a language that omits some of its vowels in its script. A word reading task employing a masked priming paradigm did not yield any differences in speech onset latencies between an onset-matching and an onset-mismatching condition. However, eventrelated potentials (ERPs) did reveal a difference in amplitude between these two conditions, between 190 and 290 ms after target word onset. This finding specifies the masked onset priming effect (MOPE) temporally more precisely and suggests, at least in Persian, the simultaneous activation of both the non-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme and the lexical route in the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of reading aloud.