Syllable-sized units in visual word recognition: Evidence from skilled and beginning readers of French

Abstract

The experiments presented here used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981) to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable (e.g., BA) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., BALANCE). The target was either a consonant–vowel (CV) or consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. Skilled adult readers showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets corresponded to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not), but this occurred only when the carrier words had low printed frequencies. First grade readers did not show a syllable compatibility effect when tested in February of the first year of schooling; only target length influenced detection times. When tested four months later (June), however, the children with the highest scores on a reading ability test did show a syllable compatibility effect. These results suggest that reading instruction rapidly allows syllable-sized units to be accessed from print, and that this type of coding continues to influence how adult readers process low frequency words.

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

“…Recently, Doignon and Zagar (2005) advanced a similar argument to account for findings obtained with the illusory conjunction paradigm showing that the syllabic effect was modulated by bigram boundaries in French. The results obtained by Colé et al (1999) with the visual version of the syllable monitoring technique can also lead to a similar conclusion as target detection was facilitated when orthographic and phonological information were converging. In addition, the hypothesis that orthographic redundancy mediates the activation of phonological syllable units is not in contradiction either with other experiments in French and Spanish showing a syllabic neighbourhood effect when bigram frequency was not controlled (e.g., Mathey & Zagar, 2002), or with studies showing an effect of the syllabic structure when bigram frequency was controlled (Carreiras et al, 1993;Ferrand & New, 2003).…”

“…Rouibah and Taft (2001) failed to find a syllabic structure influence in a fragment judgement task and in an LDT in which syllables were marked by two different colours. On the contrary, results from a visual version of the Mehler et al's (1981) task provided evidence in favour of the syllable as a functional sublexical unit (Colé, Magnan, & Grainger, 1999). In the LDT, Mathey and Zagar (2002) found an inhibitory influence of HFSN on French words, which replicated initial findings on Spanish words (Perea & Carreiras, 1998), even when the orthographic neighbourhood was controlled.…”

“…In language acquisition, the correspondence between spoken words and meaning is the primary association, orthography being later linked to these pre-existing representations (for a discussion, see Frost, 1998). Because phonological syllables are important functional units in language acquisition, it remains possible to assume that they are also used in skilled reading (see Colé et al, 1999). Furthermore, we assume here that there is a direct connection between letters and phonological syllables that operates in the same way as the letter-word connection of the original IA model.…”

Manulex-infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme—phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material

“…Syllable-based processing also seems to play a more important role in languages where syllable boundaries are clear as they are in French and Spanish for example, unlike English which is often ambisyllabic (Colé, SprengerCharolles, Siegel, & Jimenez-Gonzalez, 2004; see also Colé, Magnan, & Grainger, 1999). In addition, reliance on the syllable could depend on the syllabic structure of the language.…”

Effect of Syllable Congruency in Sixth Graders in the Lexical Decision Task With Masked Priming

“…According to the authors, the use of syllables to recognize words can be understood as the use of phonological recoding, necessary in reading acquisition. This explanation can be related to the proposition according to which syllable units would be functional units on the indirect route of phonological recoding (e.g., Colé et al, 1999). Given that phonological recoding becomes inefficient with reading experience, such a framework predicts that syllable congruency effects would disappear in more advanced readers who would mainly rely on the lexical procedure.…”