Shared or separated representations for letters with diacritics?

Abstract

Understanding the front end of visual word recognition requires us to identify the processes by which letters are identified. Since most of the work on letter recognition has been conducted in English, letter perception modeling has been limited to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. However, many writing systems include letters with diacritic marks. In the present study, we examined whether diacritic letters are a mere variant of their base letter, and thus share the same abstract representation, or whether they function as separate elements from any other letters, and thus have separate representations. In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants performed an alphabetical decision task combined with masked priming. Target letters were preceded by the same letter (e.g., a-A), by a diacritic letter (e.g., â-A), or by an unrelated letter (e.g., z-A). The results showed that the primes sharing nominal identity (e.g., a) facilitated target processing as compared to unrelated primes (e.g., z), but that primes that included a diacritic mark (e.g., â) did not, with reaction times being similar to those in the unrelated priming condition. In Experiment 2 we replicated these results in a lexical decision task. Overall, this demonstrates that as long as diacritics are used in scripts to distinguish between lexical entries, the diacritic letters are not mere variants of their base letters but constitute unitary elements of the script in their own right, with diacritics contributing to the overall visual shape of a letter.

Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

“…Results showed that, for MONEDA-type words, the visually similar prime moñeda was not more effective than the visually dissimilar prime moseda (567 vs. 568 ms, respectively; i.e., there was no visual similarity effect); furthermore, the visually similar prime moñeda was less effective than the identity prime moneda (567 vs. 548 ms, respectively). This pattern (i.e., SIM = DIS; ID < SIM) extends not only the findings of Perea et al (2016Perea et al ( , 2018 in the Arabic script to the Latin script but also the findings of Chetail and Boursain (2019) and Domínguez and Cuetos (2018) from vowels to consonants in the Latin script. Nevertheless, the pattern of findings was different for MUÑECA-type words.…”

“…The present data also allow us to reinterpret the findings from Perea et al (2016Perea et al ( , 2018 is not due to the singular role of diacritical s igns in Arabic script, as Perea et al (2016Perea et al ( , 2018 proposed. A more parsimonious explanation is that the lack of visual similarity effects with primes containing letters with diacritical signs is a more general phenomenon: it occurs not only in Arabic but also in the Latin-based orthographies with accented vowels (tâper-TAPER = tuper-TAPER; Chetail & Boursain, 2019;Domínguez & Cuetos, 2018) and with consonant letters (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA), as in the current experiment.…”

“…Finally, there is an intermediate scenario: one might argue that only the letters with diacritical signs play a special role during the initial stages of processing (i.e., n would activateñ, whereasñ would not activate n more than a control letter; see above). If so, one would expect a different pattern for moneda-type words and muñeca-type words: word identification times would be similar for moñeda-MONEDA and moseda-MONEDA (i.e., a pattern similar to that reported by Chetail & Boursain, 2019, using primes in which the critical letters contained diacritical signs), but word identification times would be faster for muneca-MUÑECA than for museca-MUÑECA (i.e., a visual similarity effect; Gutiérrez et al, 2019; Marcet & Perea, 2017, using primes in which the critical letters did not contain diacritical signs).…”

“…There is some recent evidence that supports the idea that diacritics have a special role in letter/word processing in the Latin script. In a recent masked priming lexical decision experiment in French, Chetail and Boursain (2019) found a substantial 50-ms advantage of the identity condition (e.g., taper-TAPER) over a visually similar replaced-vowel priming condition in which the vowel had a diacritical sign (tâper-TAPER). Furthermore, the latencies of the visually similar priming condition (tâper-TAPER) were similar as the latencies of a visually different replaced-vowel priming condition (tuper-TAPER).…”

“…However, the diacritical sign~is a highly salient element so that a prime containing this sign on top of the glyph n might not be highly effective (keep mind that the diacritical sign~would exclude the letter "n" as a good match). This question was not examined in the Chetail and Boursain (2019) and Domínguez and Cuetos (2018) experiments: they always used stimuli with diacritical signs as primes (e.g., tâper-TAPER, but not decider-DÉCIDER).…”