Syllabic length effects in visual word recognition and naming

Two experiments investigated the role of the number of syllables in visual word recognition and naming. Experiment 1 (word and nonword naming) showed that effects of number of syllables on naming latencies were observed for nonwords and very low-frequency words but not for high-frequency words. In Experiment 2 (lexical decision), syllabic length effects were also obtained for very low-frequency words but not for high-frequency words and nonwords. These results suggest that visual word recognition and naming do require syllabic decomposition, at least for very low-frequency words in French. These data are compatible with the multiple-trace memory model for polysyllabic word reading [Psychol. Rev. 105 (1998) 678]. In this model, reading depends on the activity of two procedures: (1) a global procedure that operates in parallel across a letter string (and does not generate a strong syllabic length effect) and that is the predominant process in generating responses to high-frequency words, and (2) an analytic procedure that operates serially across a letter string (and generates a strong syllabic length effect) and that is the predominant process in generating responses to very low-frequency words. A modified version of the dual route cascaded model [Psychol. Rev. 108 (1) (2001) 204] can also explain the present results, provided that syllabic units are included in this model. However, the Parallel Distributed Processing model [Psychol. Rev. 96 (1989) 523; J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Perception Perform. 16 (1990) 92] has difficulties to account for these results.     

Differential Effects of Number of Letters on Word and Nonword Naming Latency

The issue addressed in this study is whether there are differential effects of number of letters on word and nonword naming latency. Experiment 1 examined the effect of number of letters on latency for naming high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords. Number of letters affected latency for low-frequency words and nonwords but did not affect latency for high-frequency words. Number of letters was also negatively correlated with number of orthographic neighbours, number of friends, and average grapheme frequency. Number of letters continued to affect nonword naming latency, but not low-frequency word naming latency, after the effects of orthographic neighbourhood size, number of friends, and average grapheme frequency had been accounted for. Experiment 2 found that number of letters had no effect on the latency of delayed naming of the same words and nonwords. It is concluded that the effect of number of letters on nonword naming reflects a sequential, non-lexical reading mechanism.     

Naming the color of a word: is it responses or task sets that compete?

Subjects named the colors in which high- and low-frequency words and pronounceable nonwords, otherwise matched, were displayed. Color naming was slower for all three item types than for visually equivalent strings of nonalphanumeric symbols but was no slower for words than for nonwords, nor for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words. Unpronounceable letter strings had intermediate color-naming latencies. However, frequency and lexical status had large effects on latency for reading the same words and pseudowords aloud. Interference is thus predicted not by the strength of association between a letter string and its pronunciation but by the presence of word-like constituents. We argue that the interference from an unprimed noncolor word is due to, and isolates, one of two components of the classic Stroop effect: competition from the whole task set of reading. The other component, response competition, occurs only when lexical access is sufficiently primed.     

Reading and lexicalization in opaque and transparent orthographies: Word naming and word learning in English and Spanish

Do skilled readers of opaque and transparent orthographies make differential use of lexical and sublexical processes when converting words from print to sound? Two experiments are reported, which address that question, using effects of letter length on naming latencies as an index of the involvement of sublexical letter–sound conversion. Adult native speakers of English (Experiment 1) and Spanish (Experiment 2) read aloud four- and seven-letter high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords in their native language. The stimuli were interleaved and presented 10 times in a first testing session and 10 more times in a second session 28 days later. Effects of lexicality were observed in both languages, indicating the deployment of lexical representations in word naming. Naming latencies to both words and nonwords reduced across repetitions on Day 1, with those savings being retained to Day 28. Length effects were, however, greater for Spanish than English word naming. Reaction times to long and short nonwords converged with repeated presentations in both languages, but less in Spanish than in English. The results support the hypothesis that reading in opaque orthographies favours the rapid creation and use of lexical representations, while reading in transparent orthographies makes more use of a combination of lexical and sublexical processing.     

Naming multisyllabic words

The process of reading multisyllabic words aloud from print was examined in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 used multisyllabic words that vary in terms of the consistency of component spelling-sound correspondences. The stimuli were regular, regular inconsistent, and exception words analogous to the monosyllabic items used in previous studies. Both regular inconsistent and exception words produced longer naming latencies than regular words. In Experiment 2 these differences between word types were found to be limited to lower frequency items. Experiment 3 showed that effects of number of syllables on naming latency are also limited to lower frequency words when the stimulus display forced subjects to use syllabic units. Thus, frequency modulates the effects of two aspects of lexical structure-consistency of spelling-sound correspondences and number of syllables. The results suggest that the naming of multisyllabic words draws on some of the same knowledge representations and processes as monosyllabic words; however, naming does not require syllabic decomposition. The results are discussed in the context of current models of naming.     

Why do non-color words interfere with color naming?

In the non-color-word Stroop task, university students' response latencies were longer for low-frequency than for higher frequency target words. Visual identity primes facilitated color naming in groups reading the prime silently or processing it semantically (Experiment 1) but did not when participants generated a rhyme of the prime (Experiment 3). With auditory identity primes, generating an associate or a rhyme of the prime produced interference (Experiments 2 and 3). Color-naming latencies were longer for nonwords than for words (Experiment 4). There was a small long-term repetition benefit in color naming for low-frequency words that had been presented in the lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Facilitation of word recognition speeds color naming except when phonological activation of the base word increases response competition.     

Previewing the neighborhood: the role of orthographic neighbors as parafoveal previews in reading

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles were reversed. In Experiment 1, neighbor words provided as much preview benefit as identical words and greater benefit than nonwords, whereas in Experiment 2, neighbor words provided no greater preview benefit than nonwords. These results indicate that the frequency of a preview influences the extraction of letter information without setting up appreciable competition between previews and targets. This is consistent with a model of word recognition in which early stages largely depend on excitation of letter information, and competition between lexical candidates becomes important only in later stages.     

The syllable’s role in speech production: Are syllables chunks, schemas, or both?

Two experiments, one using the masked priming technique combined with very brief prime exposures and the other using a new technique, the induction technique, were run in order to investigate the role of syllabic structure in speech production. Experiment 1 (masked priming) showed no effect when primes shared only the abstract syllabic structure without the phonological content, whereas the same picture stimuli produced a syllabic priming effect in Ferrand, Segui, and Grainger (1996, Experiment 4) when primes corresponded to full syllables. In contrast, the results of Experiment 2 (induction) showed that picture naming latencies were significantly faster when subjects had first read aloud a set of words with the same syllabic structure than when these words did not share the syllabic structure with the picture target. This result was also observed when the set was composed of nonwords. These results demonstrate that the abstract syllabic structure (independently of its phonological content) plays an important role in speech production depending on the task used.     

Similarity neighborhoods of spoken two-syllable words: retroactive effects on multiple activation

This research examines the recognition of two-syllable spoken words and the means by which the auditory word recognition process deals with ambiguous stimulus information. The experiments reported here investigate the influence of individual syllables within two-syllable words on the recognition of each other. Specifically, perceptual identification of two-syllable words comprised of two monosyllabic words (spondees) was examined. Individual syllables within a spondee were characterized as either "easy" or "hard" depending on the syllable's neighborhood characteristics; an easy syllable was defined as a high-frequency word in a sparse neighborhood of low-frequency words, and a hard syllable as a low-frequency word in a high-density, high-frequency neighborhood. In Experiment 1, stimuli were created by splicing together recordings of the component syllables of the spondee, thus equating for syllable stress. Additional experiments tested the perceptual identification of naturally produced spondees, spliced nonwords, and monosyllables alone. Neighborhood structure had a strong effect on identification in all experiments. In addition, identification performance for spondees with a hard-easy syllable pattern was higher than for spondees with an easy-hard syllable pattern, indicating a primarily retroactive pattern of influence in spoken word recognition. Results strongly suggest that word recognition involves multiple activation and delayed commitment, thus ensuring accurate and efficient recognition.     

Processing of Syllables in Production and Recognition Tasks

Empirical evidence for a functional role of syllables in visual word processing is abundant, however it remains rather heterogeneous. The present study aims to further specify the role of syllables and the cognitive accessibility of syllabic information in word processing. The first experiment compared performance across naming and lexical decision tasks by manipulating the number of syllables in words and non-words. Results showed a syllable number effect in both the naming task and the lexical decision task. The second experiment introduced a stimulus set consisting of isolated syllabic and non-syllabic trigrams. Syllable frequency was manipulated in a naming and in a decision task requiring participants to decide on the syllabic status of letter strings. Results showed faster responses for syllables than for non-syllables in both tasks. Syllable frequency effects were observed in the decision task. In summary, the results from these manipulations of different types of syllable information confirm an important role of syllabic units in both recognition and production.     

Absence of syllable effects: multisyllabic [correction of monosyllabic] words are easier than monosyllabic [correction of multisyllabic] words.

The role of syllables using the conventional lexical task of naming was examined with 107 college students. Equal numbers of four- and six-letter mono syllabic and multisyllabic words were presented for naming. There were significant syllable effects for 4-letter words as in previous studies but not for 6-letter words. In stead, monosyllabic words take more time to process than multisyllabic words. Most monosyllabic words are exceptional words with irregular correspondence of letter to sound. These results confirm that letter-to-sound consistency is more important in word recognition than the number of syllables.     

Lexical access for low- and high-frequency words in Hebrew

The hypothesis that phonological mediation is involved to a greater extent in the recognition of low- than in the recognition of high-frequency words was examined using Hebrew. Hebrew has two forms of spelling, pointed and unpointed, which differ greatly in the extent of phonological ambiguity, with the unpointed spelling lacking almost all vowel information. A lexical decision task was employed using target words that had only one pronunciation whether pointed or unpointed. Targets were either pointed or unpointed and were preceded by a prime, which for word targets, was either semantically related or unrelated. The results indicated the following: First, the advantage of pointed over unpointed spelling was larger for low-frequency than for high-frequency words, suggesting a stronger phonological mediation for low-frequency words. Second, the size of the pointing effect was independent of word length, suggesting that phonology is obtained on the basis of the printed word as a whole, by looking it up in a phonological lexicon. Third, response latency to nonwords was not affected by the presence or absence of pointing, suggesting that failure to locate the entry corresponding to a letter string in a phonological lexicon results in a NO decision. Fourth, presence of a related prime was not found to compensate for absence of pointing, suggesting that the activation of a word’s representation in the semantic lexicon does not aid access to its corresponding entry in the phonological lexicon.     

Detection of intraword and interword letter repetition: A test of the word unitization hypothesis

Do words, as familiar units or gestalts, tend to swallow up and conceal their letter components (Pillsbury, 1897)? Letters typically are detected faster and more accurately in words than in nonwords (i.e., scrambled collections of letters), and in more frequent words than in less frequent words. However, a word advantage at encoding, where the representation of the string is formed, might compensate for, and thus mask, a word disadvantage at decoding and comparison, where the component letters of the representation are accessed and compared with the target letter. To better reveal any such word disadvantage, a task was used in this study that increased the amount of letter processing. Subjects judged whether a letter was repeated within a six-letter word or a nonword (Experiment 1; intraword letter repetition) or was repeated between two adjacent unrelated six-letter words or nonwords (Experiment 2; interword letter repetition). Contrary to Pillsbury's word unitization hypothesis, both types of letter repetition (intraword and interword) were detected faster and just as accurately with words as with nonwords. In Experiment 2, however, interword letter repetition was detected less accurately on common words (but not on rare words or third-order pseudowords) than on the corresponding nonwords. Thus, although the familiar word does not deny access to its own component letters, it does make their comparison with letters from other words more difficult.     

Sequential effects in naming: a time-criterion account

S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, and L. Colombo (1997) reported that target naming latencies are strongly affected by the difficulty of the other stimuli in a trial block, an effect they attributed to readers' strategic use of a time criterion to guide responding. In the present research, the authors asked whether there are also trial-by-trial ("sequential") effects by examining naming latency as a function of the difficulty of the preceding stimulus. In Experiment 1, both nonwords and high-frequency regular words were named more rapidly following a word than a nonword. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 were parallel experiments involving a variety of stimulus types (e.g., high- and low-frequency inconsistent words, easy and hard nonwords). In all cases, similar sequential effects were observed (i.e., all stimulus types had shorter latencies following an easier-to-name than a harder-to-name stimulus). In terms of the time-criterion account, criterion placement appears to be affected by the relative difficulty of the preceding stimulus in a way that is independent of stimulus type.     

The role of selective attention in perceptual and affective priming

Two kinds of perceptual priming (word identification and word fragment completion), as well as preference priming (that may rely on special affective mechanisms) were examined after participants either read or named the colors of words and nonwords at study. Participants named the colors of words more slowly than the colors of nonwords, indicating that lexical processing of the words occurred at study. Nonetheless, priming on all three tests was lower after color naming than after reading, despite evidence of lexical processing during color naming shown by slower responses to words than to nonwords. These results indicate that selective attention to (rather than the mere processing of) letter string identity at study is important for subsequent repetition priming.     

Isolating visual units in the perception of words and nonwords

In three experiments, reaction times for same-different judgments were obtained for pairs of words, pronounceable nonwords (pseudowords), and unpronounceable nonwords. The stimulus strings were printed either in a single letter case or in one of several mixtures of upper- and lowercase letters. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were common one- and two-syllable words; in Experiment 2, the stimuli included both words and pseudowords; and in Experiment 3, words, pseudowords, and nonwords were used. The functional visual units for each string type were inferred from the effects that the number and placement of letter case transitions had onsame reaction time judgments. The evidence indicated a preference to encode strings in terms of multiletter perceptual units if they are present in the string. The data .also suggested that whole words can be used as functional visual units, although the extent of their use depends on contextual parameters such as knowledge that a word will be presented.     

Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: a multilingual comparison

We investigated the psychological reality of the concept of orthographical depth and its influence on visual word recognition by examining naming performance in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian. We ran three sets of experiments in which we used native speakers and identical experimental methods in each language. Experiment 1 revealed that the lexical status of the stimulus (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords) significantly affected naming in Hebrew (the deepest of the three orthographies). This effect was only moderate in English and nonsignificant in Serbo-Croatian (the shallowest of the three orthographies). Moreover, only in Hebrew did lexical status have similar effects on naming and lexical decision performance. Experiment 2 revealed that semantic priming effects in naming were larger in Hebrew than in English and completely absent in Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 3 revealed that a large proportion of nonlexical tokens (nonwords) in the stimulus list affects naming words in Hebrew and in English, but not in Serbo-Croatian. These results were interpreted as strong support for the orthographical depth hypothesis and suggest, in general, that in shallow orthographies phonology is generated directly from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is derived from the internal lexicon.     

Effects of targets embedded within words in a visual search task

Visual search performance can be negatively affected when both targets and distracters share a dimension relevant to the task. This study examined if visual search performance would be influenced by distracters that affect a dimension irrelevant from the task. In Experiment 1 within the letter string of a letter search task, target letters were embedded within a word. Experiment 2 compared targets embedded in words to targets embedded in nonwords. Experiment 3 compared targets embedded in words to a condition in which a word was present in a letter string, but the target letter, although in the letter string, was not embedded within the word. The results showed that visual search performance was negatively affected when a target appeared within a high frequency word. These results suggest that the interaction and effectiveness of distracters is not merely dependent upon common features of the target and distracters, but can be affected by word frequency (a dimension not related to the task demands).     

The influence of code‐oriented versus meaning‐oriented approaches to reading instruction on word recognition in the Spanish language

This study was designed to examine the possible effect of instructional method and grade on the development of the competences used in reading isolated words in a transparent orthography (i.e., Spanish). A cross‐sectional design was used with a sample of 202 children who were learning to read by different instructional methods (code‐oriented vs. meaning‐oriented approaches). The effect of instructional method was analysed on reaction times, latency responses, and misreading on lexical decision and naming tasks. Words varied in frequency, length, and positional frequency of syllables (PFS) and the nonwords varied only in length and PFS. Our prediction was that the differences in reaction times and error performance as a function of the variables that allow us to test the routes—such as lexicality, word frequency, PFS, and word length—would be greater in the individuals who learn by a meaning‐oriented approach, which means that this group would be more affected by unfamiliar and longer words, low PFS, and nonwords in comparison to individuals who learn by a code‐oriented approach. This would support the view that individuals who learn by a meaning‐oriented approach have particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation. Reliable effects of instructional method were found both in reaction times and latency responses and also on misreading in words and nonwords. The findings demonstrate superiority in the sublexical analysis in children who were learning by code‐oriented approaches. However, individuals who were learning by meaning‐oriented approaches had particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation.     

The attentional control of lexical processing pathways: Reversing the word frequency effect

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of word frequency in speeded word naming and in a relatively novel regularization task in which participants were required to pronounce words on the basis of spelling-to-sound correspondences instead of giving their normal pronunciations (e.g., pronounce pint so that it rhymes with hint). Participants were presented high- and low-frequency regular words and exception words, along with a set of nonwords. The results indicated that there was a normal word frequency effect (i.e., high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words) in the standard speeded naming task, whereas, for the regularization task, the word frequency effect was reversed for regular words, even though the regular words were pronounced in an identical fashion in both the normal naming and the regularization tasks. This reversal of the word frequency effect was not obtained for the exception words. The discussion focuses on the implication of these results for attentional control models of lexical processing.