Beyond alphabetic orthographies: The role of form and phonology in transposition effects in Katakana

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Abstract
In the past years, there has been growing interest in how the order of letters is attained in visual word recognition. Two critical issues are: (1) whether the front-end of the recently proposed models of letter position encoding can be generalised to non-alphabetic scripts, and (2) whether phonology plays an important role in the process of letter position encoding. In the present masked priming lexical decision experiments, we employed a syllabic/moraic script (Katakana), which allows disentangling form and phonology. In Experiment 1, we found a robust masked transposed-mora priming effect: the prime a.ri.me.ka facilitates the processing of the word a.me.ri.ka relative to a double-substitution prime (a.ka.ho.ka, ). In Experiment 2, we failed to obtain any signs of a masked phoneme transposition effect (a.re.mi.ka-a.me.ri.ka vs. a.ke.hi.ka-a.me.ri.ka). In Experiment 3, we failed to find any signs of a masked phonological priming effect when the order of the consonant/vowel phonemes of the internal morae was the right one (e.g., a.ma.ro.ka-a.me.ri.ka vs. a.ka.ho.ka-a.me.ri.ka). Thus, masked transposed-mora priming effects are orthographic (rather than phonological) in nature. We discuss how the recently proposed input coding schemes can be generalised to a syllable-based script.

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