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.

[1]  Chang H. Lee.  Absence of Syllable Effects: Monosyllabic Words are Easier than Multisyllabic Words , 2001 .

[2]  B. Rapp.  The nature of sublexical orthographic organization: The bigram trough hypothesis examined , 1992 .

[3]  W. Levelt,et al.  Monitoring the Time Course of Phonological Encoding , 1995 .

[4]  M Coltheart,et al.  DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. , 2001, Psychological review.

[5]  C. J. Álvarez,et al.  Syllable Frequency and Visual Word Recognition in Spanish , 1993 .

[6]  Arthur M. Jacobs,et al.  Inhibitory effects of first syllable-frequency in lexical decision: an event-related potential study , 2004, Neuroscience Letters.

[7]  Arthur M. Jacobs,et al.  Effects of syllable-frequency in lexical decision and naming: An eye-movement study , 2005, Brain and Language.

[8]  Wolfram Ziegler,et al.  Syllable frequency and syllable structure in apraxia of speech , 2004, Brain and Language.

[9]  B. Ans,et al.  A connectionist multiple-trace memory model for polysyllabic word reading. , 1998, Psychological review.

[10]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Naming multisyllabic words. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[11]  D. Zagar,et al.  Similarity in Visual Word Recognition: The Effect of Syllabic Neighborood in French , 2002 .

[12]  Ardi Roelofs.  Syllable structure effects turn out to be word length effects: Comment on Santiago et al. (2000) , 2002 .

[13]  R. Treiman,et al.  How to see a reading unit , 1986 .

[14]  D J Mewhort,et al.  Modeling lexical decision and word naming as a retrieval process. , 1999, Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale.

[15]  Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi,et al.  Where is the length effect? A cross-linguistic study. , 1998 .

[16]  S. T. Klapp,et al.  Implicit speech inferred from response latencies in same-different decisions. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[17]  M. Zorzi,et al.  Two routes or one in reading aloud? A connectionist dual-process model. , 1998 .

[18]  A. Jacobs,et al.  Visual processing of lexical and sublexical units in dyslexia , 2003, Brain and Language.

[19]  Dominiek Sandra,et al.  Reading complex words : cross-language studies , 2003 .

[20]  H. Barber,et al.  Syllable-frequency effects in visual word recognition: evidence from ERPs , 2004, Neuroreport.

[21]  Julio Santiago,et al.  Sequential activation processes in producing words and syllables: Evidence from picture naming , 2000 .

[22]  Manuel Perea,et al.  Effects of syllable neighborhood frequency in visual word recog , 2006 .

[23]  Arnaud Rey,et al.  Graphemes are perceptual reading units , 2000, Cognition.

[24]  M. Carreiras,et al.  Effects of Syllable Frequency and Syllable Neighborhood Frequency in Visual Word Recognition , 1998 .

[25]  Juan Segui,et al.  Reading aloud polysyllabic words , 2003 .

[26]  A. Baddeley.  Working memory and language: an overview. , 2003, Journal of communication disorders.

[27]  J. Grainger,et al.  Masked Priming of Word and Picture Naming: The Role of Syllabic Units ☆ , 1996 .

[28]  C. Eriksen,et al.  Implicit speech: Mechanism in perceptual encoding? , 1970 .

[29]  J. E. J. González,et al.  IQ vs phonological recoding skill in explaining differences between poor readers and normal readers in word recognition: Evidence from a naming task , 2000 .

[30]  M. Carreiras,et al.  Naming pseudowords in Spanish: Effects of syllable frequency , 2004, Brain and Language.

[31]  Julio Santiago,et al.  Length effects turn out to be syllable structure effects: Response to Roelofs (2002) , 2002 .

[32]  Niels O. Schiller,et al.  The effect of visually masked syllable primes on the naming latencies of words and pictures , 1998 .

[33]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  A dual read-out model of word context effects in letter perception: Further investigations of the word superiority effect. , 1994 .

[34]  S. T. Klapp,et al.  Implicit speech in reading: Reconsidered , 1973 .

[35]  W. Levelt,et al.  Do speakers have access to a mental syllabary? , 1994, Cognition.

[36]  W. Ziegler,et al.  Is there a need to control for sublexical frequencies? , 2005, Brain and Language.

[37]  David C. Rubin,et al.  The subjective estimation of relative syllable frequency , 1974 .

[38]  Annette Kinder,et al.  Receiver operating characteristics in the lexical decision task: evidence for a simple signal-detection process simulated by the multiple read-out model. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[39]  Mario Braun,et al.  Frequency Effects with Visual Words and Syllables in a Dyslexic Reader , 2006, Behavioural neurology.

[40]  D W Massaro,et al.  Visual, orthographic, phonological, and lexical influences in reading. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[41]  Conrad Perry,et al.  The DRC model of visual word recognition and reading aloud: An extension to German , 2000 .

[42]  A. Jacobs,et al.  Replicating syllable frequency effects in Spanish in German: One more challenge to computational models of visual word recognition , 2004 .

[43]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[44]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Sublexical structures in visual word recognition: Access units or orthographic redundancy? , 1987 .

[45]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  Effects of syllable frequency in speech production , 2006, Cognition.

[46]  L. Lázaro,et al.  D8/17 Monoclonal Antibody: An Unclear Neuropsychiatric Marker , 2005, Behavioural neurology.

[47]  Boris New,et al.  Syllabic length effects in visual word recognition and naming. , 2003, Acta psychologica.

[48]  Prisca Stenneken,et al.  Sublexical frequency measures for orthographic and phonological units in German , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[49]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  The role of syllables in perceptual processing , 1973 .

[50]  Marina Laganaro,et al.  Syllable frequency effect in speech production: evidence from aphasia , 2005, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[51]  N. Schiller.  Single word production in english: the role of subsyllabic units during phonological encoding. , 2000 .

[52]  Wolfram Ziegler,et al.  A nonlinear model of word length effects in apraxia of speech , 2005, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[53]  A. Jacobs,et al.  Patterns of phoneme and syllable frequency in jargon aphasia , 2005, Brain and Language.

[54]  K. Forster,et al.  Lexical Access and Naming Time. , 1973 .