A phoneme effect in visual word recognition (original) (raw)
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Journal of Memory and Language, 2013
The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., nakpin, semron). The difficulty in responding to such ''TL'' nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower when the medial consonants of the baseword formed a complex coda (e.g., the rm of sermon) than when they comprised a separate coda and onset (e.g., the p and k of napkin). The same result was shown in false positive responses to nonwords when their visibility was degraded through masking. In addition, these TL effects were just as strong for nonwords like nakpin as they were for nonwords whose medial consonants formed a complex coda like warlus, but whose baseword was syllabified between those consonants (e.g., the l and r of walrus). Such findings are a challenge for most current models of letter position assignment. Instead, they can be explained by an account where bisyllabic words are stored in lexical memory with a structure that maximizes the coda of the first syllable and where medial consonants are tried out in all viable subsyllabic slots.
The role of phonology in a letter detection task
2000
In two experiments, we investigated whether onsets and rimes have a role in the processing of written English. In both experiments, participants detected letter targets (e.g., t) in nonwords like vult faster than in nonwords like vust. This finding is consistent with view that sonorants (e.g., the III of vult) cohere with preceding short vowels and are part of the vowel nucleus. In contrast, the ItI of oust is part of the syllable's coda st and so is harder to isolate. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the time required for one to detect single-member codas following vowel digraphs (e.g., the t in veet) was similar to the time to detect the same target letter following a postvocalic sonorant (e.g., the t in vult). No evidence was found for onsets. The results provide support for a phonological organization among letters of printed rimes.
Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition
Memory & Cognition, 1974
Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphernic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data. Three basic theories have been proposed to describe psychological processes that occur in recognizing printed words. The graphemic-encoding hypothesis supposes that a printed word is recognized directly from a visual representation that is used to locate stored information about the meaning of the word (Bower, 1970; Kolers, 1970). In contrast, the phonemic-encoding hypothesis presumes that recognition involves converting a visual representation of the word into a phonological representation and that the latter code provides access to lexical memory (Rubenstein, Lewis, & Rubenstein, 1971). These two theories are integrated in the dual-encoding hypo thesis (Baron, 1973; LaBerge, 1972). According to this model, lexical memory can be accessed through both visual and phonological representations of a printed word, and retrieval processes based on the two types of code may occur in parallel. The three theories are summarized in Fig. 1. Here the dashed and solid lines connect those processes associated with the graphemic-and phonernic-encoding hypotheses, respectively, while the dual-encoding hypothesis is represented by all of the operations in cornbination.' Despite the plausibility of these alternative views, the evidence supporting each of them is somewhat limited.
Journal of Experimental Psychology-human Perception and Performance, 2009
Abstract Over the last decade, there has been increasing evidence for syllabic processing during visual word recognition. If syllabic effects would prove to be independent from orthographic redundancy, this would seriously challenge the ability of current computational models to account for the processing of polysyllabic words. Three experiments are presented to disentangle effects of the frequency of syllabic units and orthographic segments in lexical decision. In Experiment 1 we obtained an inhibitory syllable-frequency effect that was unaffected by the presence or absence of a "bigram trough" at the syllable boundary. In Experiments 2 and 3 an inhibitory effect of initial syllable-frequency but a facilitative effect of initial bigram-frequency emerged when manipulating one of the two measures and controlling for the other in Spanish words starting with CV-syllables. We conclude that effects of syllable-frequency and letter cluster frequency are independent and arise at different processing levels of visual word recognition. Results are discussed within the framework of an interactive activation model of visual word recognition.
On the role of competing word units in visual word recognition: The neighborhood frequency effect
Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 1989
Current models of word recognition generally assume that word units orthographically similar to a stimulus word are involved in the visual recognition of this word. We refer to this set of orthographically similar words as an orthographic neighborhood. Two experiments are presented that investigate the ways in which the composition ofthis neighborhood can affect word recognition. The data indicate that the presence in the neighborhood of at least one unit of higher frequency than the stimulus word itself results in interference in stimulus word processing. Lexical decision latencies (Experiment 1) and gaze durations (Experiment 2) to words with one neighbor of higher frequency were significantly longer than to words without a more frequent neighbor. This neighborhood frequency effect is discussed in terms of the different types of candidate selection process postulated by contemporary models of visual word recognition.
Are syllables phonological units in visual word recognition?
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2004
A number of studies have shown that syllables play an important role in visual word recognition in Spanish. We report three lexical decision experiments with a masked priming technique that examined whether syllabic effects are phonological or orthographic in nature. In all cases, primes were nonwords. In Experiment 1, latencies to CV words were faster when primes and targets shared the first syllable (ju.nas-JU.NIO) than when they shared the initial letters but not the first syllable (jun.tu-JU.NIO). In Experiment 2, this syllabic overlap could be phonological þ orthographical (vi.rel-VI.RUS) or just phonological (bi.rel-VI.RUS). A syllable priming effect was found for CV words in both the phonological þ orthographical and the phonological condition. In Experiment 3 we compared a ''phonologicalsyllable'' condition (bi.rel-VI.RUS) with two control conditions (fi.rel-VI.RUS and vir.ga-VI.RUS). We found faster latencies for the phonological-syllabic condition than for the control conditions. These results suggest that syllabic effects are phonological in nature. One important issue in visual word recognition is to determine the role played by sublexical units such as the syllable. It has been claimed that words are not processed as a whole, but rather the lexical processor routinely uses the syllable as a sublexical unit (
Applied Psycholinguistics, 1999
The experiments presented here used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981) to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable (e.g., BA) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., BALANCE). The target was either a consonant–vowel (CV) or consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. Skilled adult readers showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets corresponded to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not), but this occurred only when the carrier words had low printed frequencies. First grade readers did not show a syllable compatibility effect when tested in February of the first year of schooling; only target length influenced detection ti...
Neighborhood frequency effects and letter visibility in visual word recognition
Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 1992
Two experiments are described that measured lexical decision latencies and errors to five-letter French words with a single higher frequency orthographic neighbor and control words with no higher frequency neighbors. The higher frequency neighbor differed from the stimulus word by either the second letter (e.g.,astre-autre) or the fourth letter (chope-chose). Neighborhood frequency effects were found to interact with this factor, and significant interference was observed only tochope-type words. The effects of neighborhood frequency were also found to interact with the position of initial fixation in the stimulus word (either the second letter or the fourth letter). Interference was greatly reduced when the initial fixation was on the critical disambiguating letter (i.e., the letterp inchope). Moreover, word recognition was improved when subjects initially fixated the second letter relative to when they initially fixated the fourth letter of a five-letter word, but this second-letter advantage practically disappeared when the stimulus differed from a more frequent word by its fourth letter. The results are interpreted in terms of the interaction between visual and lexical factors in visual word recognition.
Homophone interference effects in visual word recognition
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A, 2003
In three lexical decision experiments and one progressive demasking experiment, performance on low-frequency heterographic homophones having a high-frequency mate was compared with performance on non-homophone target words with or without high-frequency orthographic neighbours. Robust homophone interference effects were observed in all experiments, as well as inhibitory effects of neighbourhood frequency. When speed-accuracy trade-offs were reduced, the homophone interference effects were found to be additive with effects of high-frequency orthographic neighbours. Furthermore, the size of homophone interference effects increased when pseudohomophone stimuli were presented among the nonwords. These results are tentatively interpreted within the framework of a bi-modal interactive activation model. Much recent work on how people recognize written and spoken words has focused on the competitive nature of the underlying processes (e.g., Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 1995). It is assumed that bottom-up information provides an initial partial match to a multiplicity of whole-word representations in long-term memory (representations coding orthographic and/or phonological descriptions, for example). This multiple partial matching generates competitive processes inasmuch as only one word can be recognized at a time. The term competition is used here to convey the hypothesis that the processing of a given word is always influenced by the existence of other partially matching words. Although a competitionfree, best-match algorithm (whether parallel or serial) would guarantee that the correct word is indeed identified in idealized noise-free conditions, the experimental data at present suggest that competitive processes are an integral part of how we recognize words. These hypothetical competitive processes operating during visual word recognition are triggered by the initial partial match established between sensory information extracted from Requests for reprints should be sent to Ludovic Ferrand,
abstract One of the problems of Amharic orthography is a lack of consistency where the four Amharic sounds (/h/, /ʔ/, /s/ and /s'/) are mapped onto more than a single letter. The objective of these psychological experiments was to investigate the visual recognition of the graphic variants of the letters, both in isolation and within words. The experiments involved computation of the frequency counts of the letters in the Ten Ten Corpus for Amharic and the result revealed that there is a clear pattern of preference for the letters: the letters representing /h/ had the pattern <ሀ> <ሐ> <ኀ> , the letters representing /ʔ/ had the pattern <አ> <ዐ> , the letters representing /s/ had the pattern <ሰ> <ሠ> , and the letters representing /s'/ had the pattern <ጸ> <ፀ> in descending order of frequency. Similarly, the experiments indicated that frequency counts are significantly related to visual recognition of a letter, with the more frequent letters recognized faster with fewer errors. It was also observed that the target letters were recognized with a shorter reaction time when they were paired with themselves, but the recognition time was longer when they occurred with their graphic variants. Moreover, significantly higher percentage of errors were made when the target letters were matched with their graphic variants or their distractors in the alphabet recognition task. Similar patterns were also observed in the lexical decision task when the target letters were presented in words and pseudo-words. More rigorous psycholinguis-tic experiments, which will involve a large number of participants, are recommended to validate the results of the current experiments. [1] introduction There is a large body of empirical evidence which shows that letters constitute the smallest perceptual units in visual recognition of words (Fiset et al. 2008). For instance, Pelli et al. (2003) reported that a word cannot be read if its letters are not separately decoded. Employing a masking technique, they observed that the stimulus energy for the recognition of a word is directly related to the number of letters. Similarly, Martelli, Majaj & Pelli (2005) found that word