Are goats chèvres, chévres, chēvres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels.

Abstract

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is “yes” in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in [‘ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but “no” in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels /ɛ/ and /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter : , , , and ). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., , goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2–4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., , ) or not (the macron sign, as in ). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5–6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., , horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing () or not (). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels.

Rëâdīńg wõrdš wîth ōrńåmêńtš: is there a cost?

“…Only a few studies have recently investigated whether there is a cost associated with the addition of non-existent diacritics to words. Labusch et al (2023) conducted a semantic categorization task on non-diacritical French words [e.g., chēval vs. cheval (horse); the macron diacritic in ē does not exist in French] and found a small advantage of intact words (around 11 ms) over those with an additional non-existent diacritic. Furthermore, in a masked priming lexical decision experiment in English, Perea et al (2023a) found that the recognition of a target word such as CLOCK was 7 ms faster when the identity prime was intact (e.g., clock) than when the identity prime had an additional diacritic (e.g., clóck).…”

The role of orthographic and phonological processing during reading Chinese sentences: Evidence from eye movements

“…For languages using the Roman script (for instance, English, Spanish, and French, among others), it may be difficult to isolate phonological and orthographical effects due to strong grapheme-phoneme correspondences (the strong overlap between orthography and phonology) ( Vasilev et al, 2019 ; Meade, 2020 ). Recent studies have also shown that the grapheme-phoneme pattern regulates the effect of phonology on the time course of word processing ( Labusch et al, 2022 ). Moreover, even orthographic control condition typically shares one phoneme (at least) of the target word.…”