Are syllables phonological units in visual word recognition? (original) (raw)
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Syllable-frequency effect in visual word recognition: Evidence of sequential-type processing
Psicológica, 2000
Three experiments examine the syllable-frequency effect during visual word recognition in Spanish. Disyllabic words and pseudowords were employed manipulating the positional frequency of the first and the second syllable as well as the word frequency (only for words). A standard lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a temporal separation technique (Experiments 2 & 3), in which either the first or the second syllable acted as a prime of the whole stimulus were used, measuring reaction times and errors. The results replicated the inhibitory effect of syllable-frequency obtained in several previous experiments in Spanish and offer support for an activational model incorporating a syllabic level. However, this type of model must incorporate sequential properties: both syllables activate lexical representations but they do not play exactly the same role, indicating a bias toward the first syllable. The implications of the findings for the notion of a sequential-type processing are discussed.
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.
The Effect of Visually Masked Syllable Primes on the Naming Latencies of Words and Pictures* 1,* 2
Journal of Memory and Language, 1998
To investigate the role of the syllable in Dutch speech production, five experiments were carried out to examine the effect of visually masked syllable primes on the naming latencies for written words and pictures. Targets had clear syllable boundaries and began with a CV syllable (e.g., ka.no) or a CVC syllable (e.g., kak.tus), or had ambiguous syllable boundaries and began with a CV[C] syllable (e.g., ka[pp]er). In the syllable match condition, bisyllabic Dutch nouns or verbs were preceded by primes that were identical to the target's first syllable. In the syllable mismatch condition, the prime was either shorter or longer than the target's first syllable. A neutral condition was also included. None of the experiments showed a syllable priming effect. Instead, all related primes facilitated the naming of the targets. It is concluded that the syllable does not play a role in the process of phonological encoding in Dutch. Because the amount of facilitation increased with increasing overlap between prime and target, the priming effect is accounted for by a segmental overlap hypothesis.
Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition
Psychological Science, 2005
Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only—not the second—produced facilitation in both the lexical decision and the naming tasks. These findings suggest that, for polysyllabic words, phonological codes are computed sequentially during silent reading and reading aloud.
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...
Early Event-related Potential Effects of Syllabic Processing during Visual Word Recognition
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2005
& A number of behavioral studies have suggested that syllables might play an important role in visual word recognition in some languages. We report two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using a new paradigm showing that syllabic units modulate early ERP components. In Experiment 1, words and pseudowords were presented visually and colored so that there was a match or a mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The results showed color-syllable congruency effects in the time window of the P200. Lexicality modulated the N400 amplitude, but no effects of this variable were obtained at the P200 window. In Experiment 2, high-and low-frequency words and pseudowords were presented in the congruent and incongruent conditions. The results again showed congruency effects at the P200 for low-frequency words and pseudowords, but not for high-frequency words. Lexicality and lexical frequency effects showed up at the N400 component. The results suggest a dissociation between syllabic and lexical effects with important consequences for models of visual word recognition. & D
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.
Seminars in Hematology, 2011
There is an ongoing debate in cognitive psychology as to whether syllables have to be seen as functional units not only for speech perception and production, but also for the process of silent reading or visual word recognition. For the present study, we used a perceptive identification task where single disyllabic 5-letter German words were briefly presented to the participants for 50 or 60 milliseconds. The percentage of errors in identifying these stimuli was the dependent variable. During presentation in the experiment we manipulated the viewing position for these items, so that initial fixation for each repeatedly presented word varied systematically across all five letter positions. Typically, for such manipulations, word recognition is best when initial fixation is at a position slightly left from the word center – a finding referred to as the optimal viewing position effect. We found that the shape of the optimal viewing position function is sensitive to syllabic structure: The optimal viewing position shifted one letter position to the right with increasing initial syllable length (two vs. three letters in our stimulus material). This finding suggests that efficient reading benefits from a very early processing of syllabic information. It corroborates other recent empirical findings suggesting that also during silent reading orthographic word forms are automatically segmented into their syllabic constituents.
The Effect of Phonological Structure on Visual Word Access in Bilinguals
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2007
Two experiments examined if visual word access varies cross-linguistically by studying Spanish/English adult bilinguals, priming two syllable CVCV words both within (Experiment 1) and across (Experiment 2) syllable boundaries in the two languages. Spanish readers accessed more first syllables based on within syllable primes compared to English readers. In contrast, syllable-based primes helped English readers recognize more words than in Spanish, suggesting that experienced English readers activate a larger unit in the initial stages of word recognition. Primes spanning the syllable boundary affected readers of both languages in similar ways. In this priming context, primes that did not span the syllable boundary helped Spanish readers recognize more syllables, while English readers identified more words, further confirming the importance of the syllable in Spanish and suggesting a larger unit in English. Overall, the experiments provide evidence that readers use different units in accessing words in the two languages.