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...