Orthographic precision for word naming in skilled readers

The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007) argues that variation in the quality of lexical representations will affect individual reading performance. Whilst several studies have focused on reading comprehension, few have considered the role of lexical quality in decoding. Two experiments investigated individual differences in the neighbourhood density effect shown during visual words and pseudowords naming. Word and pseudoword targets with dense and sparse neighbourhoods were used in a masked form priming experiment with 84 university students. Individual difference measures of language and cognitive processes were collected, and a principal component analysis was used to group these data into components. We observed larger facilitatory form priming for words with a sparse neighbourhood than those with a dense neighbourhood. Form priming was also affected by a factor linking to orthographic precision: in people with low orthographic precision, word targets with dense neighbourhoods preceded by word primes showed stronger facilitatory priming than those that followed pseudoword primes, while the converse was demonstrated for word targets with sparse neighbourhoods. People with high orthographic precision only showed facilitatory priming. Facilitatory form priming for pseudoword targets preceded by pseudoword primes was smaller than for those that followed word primes in people with low orthographic precision. The opposite pattern was found for people with high orthographic precision. These results suggest that the component of orthographic precision is linked to the facilitatory effects of decoding for word recognition. The implications for theories of masked priming in production and the lexical quality hypothesis applied to reading skill are discussed.