Orthographic and Morphemic Effects in the Written Syllable Counting Task

Abstract

and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comment on a previous version of the manuscript.Word count: 7,115 (main text + footnote + appendices)Reference count: 40 CV pattern and morphemic structure 2 AbstractAccording to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants and vowels (i.e., CV pattern) constrains the orthographic structure of words. Here,we examined to what extent the morphological structure of words modifies the influence of the CV pattern in a syllable counting task. Participants were presented with written words matched for the number of syllables and comprising either one vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g. création) or the same number of vowel clusters (control words, e.g., crépiter). Participants were slower and less accurate for hiatus than control stimuli, be it words (Experiments 1,3) or pseudowords (Experiment 2). More importantly, this hiatus effect was present even when the stimuli had a morphemic boundary falling within the hiatus (e.g., ré-agir). The results suggest that the CV pattern of items more strongly influences performance in the syllable counting task than the morphological structure.Keywords: CV pattern, morphemes, prefix, hiatus, written word processing CV pattern and morphemic structure 3 The issue of polysyllabic word reading has been of high interest in the last decades, and there is now converging evidence that large units such as morphemes or syllables are activated during visual word recognition (see Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012;Chetail, 2012, for reviews on morphemic and syllabic effects respectively). However, little is known about how these units interact during word processing, the role of each unit being usually investigated separately. In the present study, we examined the interactions between the syllabic, orthographic, and morphemic structure of letter strings during written processing.A large number of studies have demonstrated that syllabic units are activated during written word processing. For example, words with syllables of high frequency are processed more slowly than words with syllables of low frequency (e.g., Carreiras, Alvarez, & de Vega, 1993, in Spanish; Conrad & Jacobs, 2004, in German). The effect has been accounted for in terms of competition between words sharing the initial phonological syllable (referred to as syllabic neighbours). During lexical access, syllabic neighbours are activated and compete with the target, thus delaying its processing. Competition would be stronger when there are numerous syllabic neighbours, that is, when the target contains a high-frequency syllable rather than a low-frequency one (Carreiras et al., 1993). Inhibitory effects of syllabic neighbourhood have also been confirmed in masked priming experiments (e.g., Carreiras & Perea, 2002;Dominguez, de Vega, & Cuetos, 1997; in Spanish; Mathey, Doignon-Camus, & Chetail, 2013, in French). For example, Mathey et al. (2013) showed that a French word like rocher (/ʀɔ.ʃe/) which has a first syllable of low f...