Effects of grapheme-to-phoneme probability on writing durations

Abstract

The relative involvement of the lexical and sublexical routes across different writing tasks remains a controversial topic in the field of handwriting production research. The present article reports two experiments examining whether or not the probability of a grapheme-to-phoneme (G-P) mapping affected production during copy of polyvalent graphemes embedded in French (Exps. 1a and 1b) and Spanish (Exp. 2) known words. The relative probabilities of two different G-P mappings associated with the same polyvalent grapheme were manipulated (higher vs. lower probability). In Experiment 1a, we used the polyvalent French grapheme E. Writing durations revealed that the interletter intervals (ILIs) located before and after this letter were shorter and that the letter itself was executed faster in the condition of higher probability of the G-P mapping (e.g., SERVICE, "service") than in the lower-probability condition (e.g., SEMAINE, "week"). In Experiment 1b, we used the sequence TI (e.g., VICTIME-MARTIEN, "victim-Martian"), which is less frequent. In this case, we failed to observe significant differences between the conditions. In Experiment 2, effects similar to those obtained in Experiment 1a were found with Spanish words using different pronunciations of the letter C (e.g., DESCANSO-DESCENSO, "rest-descent"). Altogether, these results reveal that the link between a grapheme and a phoneme is weighted according to its probability in the language. Moreover, they suggest that a two-phase route linking graphemes to phonemes and phonemes to graphemes is functional during copy.

The Embodied Penman: Effector‐Specific Motor–Language Integration During Handwriting

“…Participants were instructed to use the digital pen to copy the word in uppercase (print handwriting was not enforced), as fast and as accurately as possible, on a sheet of paper placed over the digitizer. As in previous writing and spelling studies (Afonso, Álvarez, & Kandel, ; Afonso, Suárez‐Coalla, et al, ; Tainturier & Rapp, ), the conversion of lower‐ to uppercase print ensured that the task forces sublexical and/or lexical access and the to‐be‐copied stimulus is processed as a linguistic form rather than a visual shape. Subjects were instructed to write each response on a line placed at the center of the paper, starting at the beginning of the line, which was marked with a cross (+).…”

“…The full set of experimental stimuli and descriptive statistics for each variable are provided in the Supplementary material (Tables S5 and S6, respectively). In line with previous protocols (Afonso & Alvarez, 2011), the synonymous word preceding each target verb was established by at least one dictionary of Spanish synonyms -sinonimosonline (7Graus Lda., 2014), Wordreference (Kellogg, n.d.), synonimos (Storpub, n.d.). Across conditions, synonyms were matched by (a) word frequency [F(2, 71) = .47, p = .63], (b) orthographic length [F(2, 71) = 1.00, p = .37], (c) syllabic length [F(2, 71) = .99, p = .38], (d) orthographic neighborhood [F(2, 71) = 1.15, p = .32], (e) mean bigram frequency [F(2, 71) = .13, p = .88], and (f) age of acquisition [F(2, 71) = 1.15, p = .32].…”

Is there a cost at encoding words with joined letters during visual word recognition?

“…Further research should examine whether there is also a cost for reading words with joined letters in primary school children-if so, publishers should modify the typographical fonts used in stories/texts aimed at young children. Likewise, it is important to examine whether the same phenomenon occurs at the writing production level (see Afonso, Álvarez, & Kandel, 2014, for a review of handwriting production). Bear in mind that one of the first reasons why letters in words were joined together was because of the fragility of the quills when handwriting, but this does not apply to pens or pencils.…”

Dynamics of Sentence Handwriting in Dyslexia: The Impact of Frequency and Consistency

“…The nature of the spelling-motor interaction is still an unresolved issue. In fact, results from previous investigations are not consistent, in large part because varying tasks, orthographic systems, and/or measures have been employed (Søvik et al, 1994;Delattre et al, 2006;Lambert et al, 2011;Afonso et al, 2015aAfonso et al, ,b, 2018Kandel and Perret, 2015a). However, accumulating evidence suggests that there is a complex relationship between both central and peripheral processes when writing and that this relationship may change with age, spelling and graphomotor skills (Olive and Kellogg, 2002;Sausset et al, 2012;Afonso et al, 2015a;Kandel and Perret, 2015b).…”