Revisiting Orthographic Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: Insights from Pretrained Language Models

The paired lexical decision task is a common task used for studying online speech processing. Several key priming effects underlying the composition of the mental lexicon have been found using this priming paradigm, non-exhaustively including orthographic priming effects, semantic priming effects, and phonological priming. This study revisits the effects of orthographic priming in an auditory lexical decision task with English heteronymic pairs, word pairs that share the same orthographic form but have distinct phonological codes. Although heteronymic pairs present an ideal condition for orthographic priming effects to surface, heteronyms are often related to each other semantically, making it difficult to isolate possible orthographic effects from semantic priming effects. To this end, we present a novel methodology for using language models to generate semantically matched prime target controls to compare reaction times against. Using these semantically matched controls, we gather reaction time results from a sample of 29 English speaking university student and conduct Bayesian Regression analysis on 153 heteronymic prime target pairs and 343 control pairs. We find no significant difference in reaction times between heteronymic pairs and semantically matched pairs.