On the role of the upper part of words in lexical access : evidence with masked priming

More than 100 years ago, Huey (1908) indicated that the upper part of words was more relevant for perception than the lower part. Here we examined whether mutilated words, in their upper/lower portions (e.g., , , , ), can automatically access their word units in the mental lexicon. To that end, we conducted four masked repetition priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Results showed that mutilated primes produced a sizeable masked repetition priming effect. Furthermore, the magnitude of the masked repetition priming effect was greater when the upper part of the primes was preserved than when the lower portion was preserved –this was the case not only when the mutilated words were presented in lowercase but also when the mutilated words were presented in uppercase. Taken together, these findings suggest that the front-end of computational models of visual-word recognition should be modified to provide a more realistic account at the level of letter features.The research reported in this article has been partially supported by Grant PSI2008-04069/PSIC and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2008-00048 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and by Grant PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology

Introduction to the special issue: Morphology in word identification and word spelling

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Open-Ended Interviews, Power, and Emotional Labor

This article investigates the power dynamics of the interview process and the connected emotional labor, drawing on examples from a recent study on workplace grievances in which most data collection was through open-ended interviews. By exploring the shifts of power and the emotional labor demands in the qualitative, open-ended interview, this article emphasizes that power shifts and emotions within the interview are, themselves, important data. A greater awareness of shifts in interviewer/interviewee power and emotional labor in the interview context helps the researcher better understand the nuances of the data, provides the researcher with more information about the interviewee and the research topic, and facilitates greater insights into the interview process, the subjects, and the nature of the topics discussed