Schedule of Events | Symposia

Individual differences in global/local precedence may mediate lexical decision processes

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sang-Ah Yoo¹, Sung Jun Joo¹; ¹Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea

Global processing allows fast extraction of gist information, while local processing operates rather slowly, focusing on details. A previous study reported that local processing impedes the word reading-aloud speed (Franceschini et al., 2021). Our research aimed to examine whether local processing also affects the speed of other reading-related tasks. Participants (n = 80) initially performed the Navon priming task. A stimulus could be a global square or circle consisting of either congruent or incongruent local shapes. Depending on the experimental condition, participants reported either the global or local shape. Subsequently, participants engaged in a visual lexical decision task involving either Korean trisyllables or nonwords. Our Navon priming task replicated the global precedence effect, demonstrating faster reaction times for global shapes than for local ones. However, different Navon priming conditions did not significantly modulate lexical decision performance. Since approximately a quarter of our participants (n = 22) exhibited local precedence, we further tested whether this difference might be associated with lexical decision performance. For the global precedence group, lexical decisions on Korean words were slower after local Navon priming. Conversely, for the local precedence group, lexical decisions were faster after local Navon priming. Furthermore, participants who showed stronger global precedence during the Navon priming task tended to respond faster in the lexical decision task after the global Navon priming, and vice versa. The results suggest that local processing does not consistently impair the speed of reading-related tasks and that individual differences in global/local precedence should be considered.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other