On the role of consonants and vowels in visual-word processing: Evidence with a letter search paradigm

Acha, Joana; Perea, Manuel

doi:10.1080/01690960903411666

Cited by 22 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, the hypothesis of a level of representation based on vowel clusters and C/V letter distinction is in line with studies showing that consonants and vowels are distinguished early on during visual word recognition processes (e.g., Acha & Perea, 2010;Carreiras, Gillon-Dowens, Vergara, & Perea, 2008;Lee et al, 2001;New et al, 2008;Vergara-Martínez et al, 2010) as well as studies indicating a neuroanatomical basis for the distinction between consonant and vowel letters (e.g., Caramazza et al, 2000;Miceli et al, 2004). In particular, Buchwald and Rapp (2006) provided strong support to the hypothesis of representations containing specific orthographic information about C/V letter identity, distinct from phonological information.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

The internal structure of chaos: Letter category determines visual word perceptual units

Chetail

2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tThe processes and the cues determining the orthographic structure of polysyllabic words remain far from clear. In the present study, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings. In the syllabic counting task, participants were presented with written words matched for the number of spoken syllables and comprising either one vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., pharaon) or the same number of vowel clusters (e.g., parodie). Relative to control words, readers were slower and less accurate for hiatus words, for which they systematically underestimated the number of syllables (Experiment 1). The effect was stronger when the instructions emphasized response speed (Experiment 2) and when concurrent articulation was used (Experiment 3), and the effect did not stem from phonological structure (Experiment 4). Furthermore, hiatus words were more slowly and less accurately pronounced than control ones (Experiment 5). Finally, in lexical decision, opposite effects occurred as a function of word length, with shorter words producing a facilitatory effect and longer words showing interference (Experiment 6). Taken together, the results show that perceptual units extracted from visual letter strings are influenced by the orthographic status of letters. We discuss the implications of such findings in view of current theories of visual word recognition.Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IntroductionWhat do we see when we read a word? What are the functional units of word perception? These questions opened a paper by Santa, Santa, and Smith in 1977, who stated that the issue 'has generated an impressive body of literature in the last 75 years, but there is little agreement on an answer' (p. 585). More than 30 years later, the situation has hardly changed, and the claim still holds true.The issue of orthographic coding in the perception of letter strings has been of interest since the earliest times of research on reading (Huey, 1908). The interest keeps on being high currently because understanding the basic processes of visual word recognition constitutes a keystone of any theory of reading. Visual word recognition is not performed letter by letter, but rather operates on larger letter chunks that are processed simultaneously. Hence, a recurrent question in the field is to determine what processing units are involved in the early steps of written word identification and how the perceptual processing system organizes letter strings into larger units. In the present paper, we report a set of studies aimed at exploring the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowel letters) in determining the internal structure of polysyllabic words.The issue of perceptual units has been approached from different angles according to periods and dominant trends in the field. Below, we present an overview of the major approaches and then discuss their relevance for the perceptual processing of polysyllabic words, which is of sp...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

The internal structure of chaos: Letter category determines visual word perceptual units

Chetail

2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Indeed, in addition to providing converging evidence with other paradigms, it is believed to reflect key processes involved in word recognition and reading (e.g., see Acha & Perea, 2010;Pitchford et al, 2008).…”

Section: Letter Position Effects In the Letter Detection Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidence that the exterior letters of words have a privileged status was obtained using a wide variety of tasks such as letter recognition paradigms (e.g., Jordan, 1990;Jordan et al, 2000), word recognition paradigms (Humphreys et al, 1990;McCusker et al, 1981) and lexical decision tasks (Humphreys et al, 1990). One task that has been widely used is letter detection where participants are asked to indicate if a target letter is part of a word displayed on the screen (see Acha & Perea, 2010;Krueger, 1970;Mason, 1975; Pitchford, Ledgway, & Masterson, 2008).Such a task has enjoyed great popularity in the study of letter position effects. Indeed, in addition to providing converging evidence with other paradigms, it is believed to reflect key processes involved in word recognition and reading (e.g., see Acha & Perea, 2010;Pitchford et al, 2008).…”

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Assessing the influence of letter position in reading normal and transposed texts using a letter detection task.

Guérard¹,

Saint‐Aubin²,

Poirier³

et al. 2012

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: AbstractDuring word recognition, some letters appear to play a more important role than others.Although some studies have suggested that the first and last letters of a word have a privileged status, there is no consensus with regards to the importance of the different letter positions when reading connected text. In the current experiments, we used a simple letter search task to examine the impact of letter position on word identification in connected text using a classic paper and pencil procedure (Experiment 1) and an eye movement monitoring procedure (Experiment 2). InExperiments 3 and 4, a condition with transposed letters was included. Our results show that the first letter of a word is detected more easily than the other letters, and transposing letters in a word revealed the importance of the final letter. It is concluded that both the initial and final letters play a special role in word identification during reading, but that the underlying processes might differ. Word count: 153 wordsKeywords: reading, missing-letter effect, letter position, eye movementsLetter position effect in reading 3 Assessing the Influence of Letter Position in Reading Connected Texts Using a Letter Detection TaskAs the basic element of written words in alphabetic languages, the processing of letters has always had a special status in the study of word recognition. A number of studies have shown that the words exterior letters play an important role in word recognition (e.g., Humphreys, Evett, & Quilan, 1990;Jordan, Patching, & Milner, 2000;Mason, 1975;McCusker, Gough, & Bias, 1981;Stevens & Grainger, 2003). However, these studies used paradigms in which words are presented in isolation. As Jordan, pointed out: "whereas evidence of a privileged status for exterior letter pairs in processing single (foveal) word displays is plentiful […] this evidence has not been matched in studies in which words are presented in bodies of text" (p.900). Although there is evidence that both the first and the last letters of the word play a more important role than interior letters when reading connected text (e.g., Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003) other studies have shown that only the first letter is critical (e.g., Briihl & Inhoff, 1995). The objective of the present series is to examine the importance of the words' exterior letters during reading by using a letter detection task.To investigate the contribution of individual letter positions in word processing during reading, Briihl and Inhoff (1995) used an eye contingent paradigm and manipulated the availability of letters in the target word when readers were fixating the previous word. They found a preview benefit -that is, fixation duration on the target word decreased -when the first letters of the target word were available in the parafovea compared to a condition where all letters were replaced by Xs. The availability of ...

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“…Similarly Acha and Perea (2010) used this task to test the contribution of consonants and vowels to the formation of orthographic structures in Spanish. If the perceptual system is sensitive to statistical regularities of the language, Spanish subjects should show sensitiveness to the CV structure with a different search function for consonants and vowels, since consonants are more frequent in the first position and vowels are more frequent in the last position in this language.…”

Section: The Perception Of Printed Letters: the Letter Search Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the mental lexicon

Acha

Carreiras

2014

Self Cite

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Visual word recognition is a capital stage in reading. It involves accessing a mental representation of a written word, including processes such as perception, letter coding and selection of the proper candidate in our mental lexicon.One key issue for researchers on this field is to shed light on the role of phonological and orthographic processes in lexical access, as well as the choice of an input coding scheme for orthographic representations. In this paper we will review the state of the art about sublexical and lexical processes involved in lexical access. We will discuss behavioral, eye movement and electrophysiological evidence to understand: (i) which are the most important coding units, (ii) how our visual system codes identity and position of such units, (iii) which factors modulate the way we access lexical information in our minds, and (iv) the time course of such processes. We will do so from a methodological perspective, exploring a broad range of paradigms and effects that provide a complete framework about how printed words are coded and represented in our minds.Language comprehension implies isolating words, extracting their meaning, and understanding the rules according to which words are combined in sentences. Words are sound-to-meaning representations from spoken language and grapheme-to-phoneme-to-meaning representations from written language. The pool of words that we store in our cognitive system throughout our life experience and that we access for comprehending spoken and written language is known as

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On the role of consonants and vowels in visual-word processing: Evidence with a letter search paradigm

Cited by 22 publications

References 35 publications

The internal structure of chaos: Letter category determines visual word perceptual units

The internal structure of chaos: Letter category determines visual word perceptual units

Assessing the influence of letter position in reading normal and transposed texts using a letter detection task.

Exploring the mental lexicon

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