The time course of orthographic and phonological code activation.

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time course of orthographic and phonological priming in the masked priming paradigm. Participants monitored visual target words for occasional animal names, and ERPs to nonanimal critical items were recorded. These critical items were preceded by different types of primes: Orthographic priming was examined using transposed-letter (TL) primes (e.g., barin-BRAIN) and their controls (e.g., bosin-BRAIN); phonological priming was examined using pseudohomophone primes (e.g., brane-BRAIN) and their controls (e.g., brant-BRAIN). Both manipulations modulated the N250 ERP component, which is hypothesized to reflect sublexical processing during visual word recognition. Orthographic (TL) priming and phonological (pseudohomophone) priming were found to have distinct topographical distributions and different timing, with orthographic effects arising earlier than phonological effects.