Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Cross-modal TL priming effects in late German-English bilinguals are evidence for the bimodal processing of words

Speaker Stefanie Türk
Affiliaton(s) Phillips-Universität Marburg
Date 05.06.2023, 14:00-15:30 Uhr
Time 14:00 o'clock
Venue virtual

Abstract

Transposed letter (TL) non-words constructed by exchanging the positions of two letters within a word (e.g., jugde – judge) have been found to prime their base words better than orthographic controls (e.g., jupte – judge). TL effects have been replicated for a variety of different languages, different scripts as well as L1 and L2 speakers and are taken as evidence for flexible letter position coding during visual word recognition in skilled readers. TL priming effects have been attributed to rely on sub-lexical orthographic representations. However, an increasing number of studies suggests bimodal activation of orthography and phonology in word processing. Therefore, we propose that TL priming effects are observable across modalities. In three experiments using a masked priming paradigm, we first replicate TL priming effects in the visual modality in the L1 and the L2 of late German-English bilinguals. In the second and third experiments, for the first time we provide evidence for cross-modal (visual prime – auditory target) TL priming in bilinguals. Moreover, we show that cross-modal TL priming is possible with prime durations of 67 ms, but priming effects decrease with lower prime durations of 50 ms.

About Stefanie Türk

Stefanie Türk received a master’s degree in Linguistik: Cognition and Communication from the Phillips University in Marburg. She is currently a doctoral researcher at the Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, AG Neurolinguistik at Phillips University in Marburg, working in the field of speech and language processing.
In her dissertation project, Stefanie Türk focusses on the activation of orthographic and phonological representations in spoken word recognition, utilizing neurophysiological and behavioral methods.