The time course of orthography and phonology: ERP correlates of masked priming effects in Spanish.

One key issue for computational models of visual-word recognition is the time course of orthographic and phonological information during reading. Previous research, using both behavioral and event related brain potential (ERP) measures, has shown that orthographic codes are activated very early but that phonological activation starts to occur immediately afterward. Here we report an ERP masked priming experiment in Spanish that investigates this issue further by using very strict control conditions. The critical phonological comparison was between two pairs of primes having the same orthographic similarity to the target words but differing in phonological similarity (e.g., conal-CANAL vs. cinal-CANAL vis à vis ponel-PANEL vs. pinel-PANEL), whereas the critical orthographic contrast was between pairs of primes that had the same phonological similarity to the target but differing in orthographic similarity (e.g., conal-CANAL vs. konal-CANAL). Orthographic priming was mainly observed in the 150-250-ms time window whereas phonological priming occurred in the 350-550-ms window.