InfoSyll: A Syllabary Providing Statistical Information on Phonological and Orthographic Syllables

Abstract

There is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of the French language aiming at answering new constraints when designing experiments on the syllable issue. The InfoSyll syllabary provides exhaustive characteristics and statistical information for each phonological syllable (e.g., /fi/) and for its corresponding orthographic syllables (e.g., fi, phi, phy, fee, fix, fis). Variables such as the type and token positional frequencies, the number and frequencies of the correspondences between orthographic and phonological syllables are provided. As discussed, such computations should allow precise controls, manipulations and quantitative descriptions of syllabic variables in the field of psycholinguistic research.

Electrophysiological markers of syllable frequency during written word recognition in French

“…Syllable frequencies were drawn from the InfoSyll database (Chetail & Mathey, 2010). In each pair, one of the words had a first syllable of high frequency (HSF word) while the other had a first syllable of low frequency (LSF word).…”

SyllabO+: A new tool to study sublexical phenomena in spoken Quebec French

“…A few databases or corpora exist for the French language, notably Lexique 3 (New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004;New, Pallier, Ferrand, & Matos, 2001), Diphones-fr (New & Spinelli, 2013), InfoSyll (Chetail & Mathey, 2010), Texto4Science (Langlais & Drouin, 2012), QUÉBÉTEXT (Trésor de la langue française au Québec, n.d.), and Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC; Durand, Laks, & Lyche, 2001). The first database, Lexique 3, was created from a corpus of French texts and film subtitles (France)-which represent a hybrid type of corpus that is largely influenced by the written modality.…”

Effect of Syllable Congruency in Sixth Graders in the Lexical Decision Task With Masked Priming

“…French has rather clear syllabic boundaries (see Goslin & Floccia, 2007), and the most frequent syllabic structure in both orthographic and phonological forms of written words is the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable. In addition, roughly 53% of orthographic syllables have a simple syllabic structure of two or three letters long (Chetail & Mathey, 2010). Given these properties, the syllable has become of particular interest in French, explaining why most of the studies with children were carried out in this language and why syllables have been considered the potential preferred units of phonological recoding in young readers in French.…”