Syllables and morphemes: Contrasting frequency effects in Spanish.

Abstract

Three types of sublexical units were studied in Spanish visual word recognition: the syllable, the basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS), and the root morpheme. In Experiment 1, using a lexical-decision task, a typical inhibitory effect of the first-syllable frequency was found (while keeping constant the BOSS frequency) as well as the word-frequency effect. Experiment 2 examined the role of both the BOSS frequency and the word frequency, also in a lexical-decision task. Syllable frequency was controlled. Both the BOSS frequency and the word frequency showed facilitatory effects. However, in Experiments 3A and 3B, a facilitatory effect of the root frequency (when controlling for BOSS frequency) and a null effect of BOSS frequency (when controlling for root frequency) were found, suggesting that the BOSS effect is in fact reflecting a morpheme effect. A review of the current models shows that it is difficult to integrate syllables and morphemes in a unique model.

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

“…In addition, as pointed out by Sears et al (1999), the model has no means to explain inhibitory effects attributed to lexical competition. Thus, this model would inadequately accommodate the inhibitory effect of HFSN reported in previous studies on Spanish and French words (e.g., Alvarez et al, 2001;Mathey & Zagar, 2002;Perea & Carreiras, 1998) and in the participant analysis of Experiments 1a and b. Second, the PDP model does not account for syllable effects that have been shown not to be entirely attributable to a confound with orthographic redundancy, such as the interaction between bigram properties and syllabic information reported in Experiments 2a and b and also previous results found with the illusory conjunction paradigm (Doignon & Zagar, 2005;Rapp, 1992).…”

“…Perea and Carreiras (1998) found that these two factors correlate. A regression analysis indicated that the inhibitory effect of the first syllable frequency on lexical decision times was attributable to higher frequency syllabic neighbourhood (HFSN) (see also Alvarez, Carreiras, & Taft, 2001). Recently, the inhibitory effect of HFSN was replicated with a progressive demasking task, while an eye movement study revealed facilitation from HFSN in early measures only (Carreiras & Perea, 2004b).…”

Electrophysiological markers of syllable frequency during written word recognition in French

“…An inhibitory effect was found, high syllable-frequency (HSF) words being processed more slowly than low syllable-frequency (LSF) words. Since that first report, the effect has been replicated in several languages: Spanish (Alvarez, Carreiras, & Taft, 2001;Conrad, Carreiras, & Jacobs, 2008;Conrad, Carreiras, Tamm, & Jacobs, 2009), French (Chetail & Mathey, 2009;Conrad, Grainger, & Jacobs, 2007; see also Mathey & Zagar, 2002) and German Hutzler, Conrad, & Jacobs, 2005;Stenneken, Conrad, & Jacobs, 2007). At a theoretical level, the effect has been accounted for in terms of competition among candidate words sharing the initial syllable (Carreiras et al, 1993).…”

InfoSyll: A Syllabary Providing Statistical Information on Phonological and Orthographic Syllables

“…In the lexical decision task, Carreiras et al (1993) observed that skilled readers in Spanish decided more slowly that words with a high-frequency first syllable were real words than words with a low-frequency first syllable. This inhibitory effect of syllable frequency has been widely replicated in follow-up studies in Spanish (e.g., Alvarez et al 2000Alvarez et al , 2001Conrad et al 2008;Perea and Carreiras 1998), French (e.g., Chetail and Mathey 2009b;Conrad et al 2007;Mathey and Zagar 2002;Mathey et al 2006) and German (e.g., Stenneken et al 2007;Conrad and Jacobs 2004). In reading aloud also, syllable frequency effects have been reported in the naming task, the effects being either facilitative (e.g., Macizo and Van Petten 2007, in English;Perea and Carreiras 1998, in Spanish) or inhibitory (e.g., Carreiras et al 1993, in Spanish;Conrad et al 2006, in German).…”

“…Another criterion for syllable frequency computations is related to the distinction between type count (number of words sharing a given syllable) and token count (sum of the printed frequency of all words sharing a given syllable). This distinction is important since type and token frequencies could tap into different processes and can lead to opposite effects, even though these two measures of syllable frequency are highly correlated (e.g., Alvarez et al 2001). However, type and token syllable frequencies have been widely confounded in experiments on syllables to date.…”