Inhibitory Effects in Form Priming: Evaluating a Phonological Competition Explanation

Although a majority of studies support the notion that formally similar primes facilitate target processing, recent research has shown inhibition effects in some circumstances, particularly with high-frequency targets. The present studies focused on an explanation of this effect provided by a recent phonological competition model. Lexical decision results using rhyming primes indicate that the inhibition is more prevalent at short stimulus onset asynchronies and is unaffected by requiring verbal report of the prime. Naming results indicate that the inhibition only arises with irregular word pairs. Neither this model nor any of the models considered provided an adequate explanation of these effects. An alternative model that incorporates automatic, lexically based inhibition and strategically based facilitation processes is proposed.