The nature of sublexical orthographic organization: The bigram trough hypothesis examined

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

“…Thus, this model would inadequately accommodate the inhibitory effect of HFSN reported in previous studies on Spanish and French words (e.g., Alvarez et al, 2001;Mathey & Zagar, 2002;Perea & Carreiras, 1998) and in the participant analysis of Experiments 1a and b. Second, the PDP model does not account for syllable effects that have been shown not to be entirely attributable to a confound with orthographic redundancy, such as the interaction between bigram properties and syllabic information reported in Experiments 2a and b and also previous results found with the illusory conjunction paradigm (Doignon & Zagar, 2005;Rapp, 1992). As proposed by Rapp (1992), a solution which dissociates orthographic and phonological influence is to incorporate syllabic representations in the model.…”

“…In addition, the model can account for a pseudosyllable effect on monosyllabic words by means of distributional properties of letter patterns in the lexicon. The data from Seidenberg (1987) showing that monosyllabic words that exhibited a bigram trough pattern produced the same number of illusory conjunctions as bisyllabic words provided support for this hypothesis (but see Rapp, 1992). However, some effects of the syllable structure on visual word recognition remain difficult to explain within the PDP framework.…”

“…Second, the PDP model does not account for syllable effects that have been shown not to be entirely attributable to a confound with orthographic redundancy, such as the interaction between bigram properties and syllabic information reported in Experiments 2a and b and also previous results found with the illusory conjunction paradigm (Doignon & Zagar, 2005;Rapp, 1992). As proposed by Rapp (1992), a solution which dissociates orthographic and phonological influence is to incorporate syllabic representations in the model. However, it seems difficult to explain how this modification would help to resolve the first problem we have raised, that is, the inhibition from syllabic neighbourhood.…”

“…However, in speech perception of English, syllable boundaries are frequently ambiguous and experimental data suggest that syllabifying segmentation is not used (Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1986) or depends on the stress pattern of the words (Finney, Protopapas, & Eimas, 1996). Studies investigating the influence of syllables in visual word recognition and speech production have yielded inconsistent results (e.g., Prinzmetal et al, 1986;Rapp, 1992;Seidenberg, 1987; see also Ashby & Rayner, 2004). Therefore, the role of the syllable or syllable-based structure in English remains an open question.…”

Morpho-lexical Representations in Naming

“…On this view, the putative morphological effects documented in the literature could equally well be explained by such factors as frequency of orthographic patterns and, more generally, by the orthographic redundancy implicit in the distribution of letter sequences in written language (e.g. Seidenberg, 1987; but see Rapp, 1992, for a rebuttal of this view).…”