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. 2010 May 25;5(5):e10793.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010793.

The nature of abstract orthographic codes: evidence from masked priming and magnetoencephalography

Liina Pylkkänen  1 , Kana Okano
Affiliations

The nature of abstract orthographic codes: evidence from masked priming and magnetoencephalography

Liina Pylkkänen et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

What kind of mental objects are letters? Research on letter perception has mainly focussed on the visual properties of letters, showing that orthographic representations are abstract and size/shape invariant. But given that letters are, by definition, mappings between symbols and sounds, what is the role of sound in orthographic representation? We present two experiments suggesting that letters are fundamentally sound-based representations. To examine the role of sound in orthographic representation, we took advantage of the multiple scripts of Japanese. We show two types of evidence that if a Japanese word is presented in a script it never appears in, this presentation immediately activates the ("actual") visual word form of that lexical item. First, equal amounts of masked repetition priming are observed for full repetition and when the prime appears in an atypical script. Second, visual word form frequency affects neuromagnetic measures already at 100-130 ms whether the word is presented in its conventional script or in a script it never otherwise appears in. This suggests that Japanese orthographic codes are not only shape-invariant, but also script invariant. The finding that two characters belonging to different writing systems can activate the same form representation suggests that sound identity is what determines orthographic identity: as long as two symbols express the same sound, our minds represent them as part of the same character/letter.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Priming data for Experiments 1a and 1b.
With the short SOA (masked priming), full repetition and script change elicit an equal size priming effect, while no semantic priming is obtained. With the longer SOA of 300 ms, semantic priming is also observed.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Across subjects grandaveraged response to all the critical items of Exp. 2 depicting the M100 and M170 components.
The gridmap on top shows the components in sensor-space. The bottom panel depicts the field maps associated with the components. On the far left and right, the dipole localizations of all the M100s and M170s of this study are plotted within a representative subject's head frame.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Grandaveraged M100 source waveforms illustrating a visual M100 effect of frequency both for the typically and for the atypically presented stimuli.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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