Emoticons seem to enrich computer-mediated communication by improving enjoyment, perceived richness and usefulness of information (Huang, Yen, & Zhang, 2008). Despite their extensive use over the last decades, the way emoticons affect subsequent emotional/cognitive processing is not fully understood. Here we conducted a masked priming experiment that explored the time course of the masked affec...

In unconscious semantic priming, an unidentifiable visually masked word (the prime) facilitates semantic classification of a following visible related word (the target). Three experiments reported here provide evidence that masked primes are analyzed mainly at the level of word parts, not whole-word meaning. In Experiment 1, masked nonword primes composed of subword fragments of earlier-viewed ...

Masked translation priming between languages with different scripts exhibits a marked asymmetry in lexical decision, with much stronger priming from L1 to L2 than from L2 to L1. This finding was confirmed in a lexical decision task with Chinese–English bilinguals who were late learners of English. Following a suggestion made by Bradley (1991), the experiment was repeated using a speeded episodi...

Studies on French adults using a written lexical decision task with masked priming, in which targets were more primed by consonant- (jalu-JOLI) than vowel-related (vobi-JOLI) primes, support the proposal that consonants have weight vowels processing. This study examines phonological and/or nature of this consonant bias (C-bias), sandwich priming brief presentation target (pre-prime) precedes pr...

Indirect tests of remembering have revealed two different patterns of priming following generation and reading tasks: (1) read words produce more priming than generated words, which produce little or no priming relative to new words, and (2) both read and generated words show reliable and equivalent priming. In a series of six experiments using both mixed and blocked presentation of encoding ta...

One essential issue for models of bilingual memory organization is to what degree the representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In this study, we examine whether there is a symmetrical translation priming effect with highly proficient, simultaneous bilinguals. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with cognate and noncognate translation equi...

The goal of the present study is to assess whether there is an automatic and obligatory activation of the phonological lexicon upon the presentation of a written word under unconscious processing conditions. We use a cross-modal version of the masked repetition priming procedure introduced by Forster and Davis (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 10 (1984) 680) w...

Research on the processing of translations offers important insights on how bilinguals negotiate the representation of words from two languages in one mind and one brain. Evidence so far has shown that translation equivalents effectively activate each other as well as their shared concept even when translations lack of any formal overlap (i.e., non-cognates) and even when one of them is present...

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects-along with their theoretical implications-has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and implications of these effects. First, they present an...

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phon...