Does letter position coding depend on consonant/vowel status? Evidence with the masked priming technique

Recently, a number of input coding schemes (e.g., SOLAR model, SERIOL model, open-bigram model, overlap model) have been proposed that capture the transposed-letter priming effect (i.e., faster response times for jugde-JUDGE than for jupte-JUDGE). In their current version, these coding schemes do not assume any processing differences between vowels and consonants. However, in a lexical decision task, Perea and Lupker (2004, JML; Lupker, Perea, & Davis, 2008, L&CP) reported that transposed-letter priming effects occurred for consonant transpositions but not for vowel transpositions. This finding poses a challenge for these recently proposed coding schemes. Here, we report four masked priming experiments that examine whether this consonant/vowel dissociation in transposed-letter priming is task-specific. In Experiment 1, we used a lexical decision task and found a transposed-letter priming effect only for consonant transpositions. In Experiments 2–4, we employed a same–different task – a task which taps early perceptual processes – and found a robust transposed-letter priming effect that did not interact with consonant/vowel status. We examine the implications of these findings for the front-end of the models of visual word recognition.