The role of the phonological syllable in English word recognition

Daniel Trinh & Debra Jared The University of Western Ontario

Syllables in Spanish reading • syllable effects have been observed in

studies of Spanish word recognition • syllable frequency (e.g., Álvarez, Carreiras, &

Taft, 2001) • syllable congruency (e.g., Carreiras, Vergara, &

Barber, 2005) • words with two colours matched or mismatched

syllable boundary • e.g., casa vs casa

Syllable congruency • Carreiras, Vergara, and Barber (2005)

Spanish word recognition • MROM-S (Conrad, Tamm, Carreiras, &

Jacobs, 2010) • syllable level representation

Syllables in English • mixed evidence for role of syllables in

English visual word recognition • do English readers make use of syllable

information during visual word recognition? • parse into syllables?

• e.g., PLASTER • PLAS-TER

English word recognition • CDP++ model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010)

• no explicit syllable level representation

English word recognition • CDP++ model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010)

• graphemic parser

• Maximal Onset Principle as linguistic constraint

• words syllabified to have largest number of onsets • PLA-STER

English word recognition

• Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS; Taft, 1979)

• orthographic syllable unit • words syllabified to have largest number of

consonants after the first vowel • PLAST-ER

Experiment 1

• Do English readers parse words into syllables? • phonological syllable (PLAS-TER) • maximal onset (PLA-STER) • BOSS (PLAST-ER)

• ERP with lexical decision

Colour change paradigm • syllable congruency (Carreiras et al., 2005)

• casa vs casa

• critical stimuli had phonological syllable boundary between two consonants • 120 disyllabic low frequency words • e.g., plaster

1) Phonological syllables • colour change

• at syllable (plaster) • before syllable (plaster) • after syllable (plaster)

• if syllables are recovered, words should be easier to read when the colour change is congruent with the syllable boundary than when it is incongruent

Experiment 1- phonological syllable

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Before Syllable Syllable After Syllable

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(7.1)

(7.2)

(7.8)

Experiment 1- phonological syllable

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Experiment 1- phonological syllable

2) maximal onset • the same stimuli can be regrouped as to

whether the colour boundary was at the maximal onset, or one letter after

• maximal onset • at maximal onset (plaster, picnic) • after maximal onset (plaster, picnic)

Experiment 1- maximal onset

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Maximal Onset After Maximal Onset

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(6.7)

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Experiment 1- maximal onset

Experiment 1- maximal onset *

3) BOSS • the same stimuli can be regrouped as to

whether the colour boundary was at the BOSS, or one letter before

• BOSS • at BOSS (plaster, picnic) • before BOSS (plaster, picnic)

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BOSS before BOSS

Experiment 1- BOSS

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(7.8) (6.9)

Experiment 1- BOSS

Experiment 1- BOSS

Experiment 1- summary • syllable congruent condition did not differ

from both incongruent conditions in behavioural or ERP data • no clear evidence that English words are

parsed into syllables during reading

• mixed evidence for maximal onset processing

• no evidence in support of BOSS processing

Experiment 1

• N250 effect • before syllable (picnic) more negative

than syllable (picnic) and after syllable (picnic)

• more difficult to reconcile the phonology of whole word (e.g., picnic) when initial segment does not match its phonology (e.g., pi) than when it does (e.g., pic)?

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Syllable priming • Ashby (2010)

• masked priming with ERP • visually matched design • congruent

• e.g., po##-PONY, pon###-PONDER • incongruent

• e.g., pon#-PONY, po####-PONDER

Syllable priming • Ashby (2010)

• rapid activation of phonological syllable • phonological matching?

• congruent (match): po-PONY, pon-PONDER • incongruent (mismatch): pon-PONY, po-PONDER

Experiment 2- critical stimuli • colour change paradigm instead of priming

• Confound (like Ashby)

• congruent (pony ponder) • incongruent (pony ponder)

• No confound • congruent (cater catalogue) • incongruent (cater catalogue)

Experiment 2 • if phonological syllable plays an important role

• syllable congruent easier to process than syllable incongruent in both sets of words

• if syllable effect due to phonological match • syllable congruent easier to process than syllable

incongruent only for phonologically confounded words

Experiment 2- confound words

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pony ponder

Experiment 2- no confound words

cater catalogue

Experiment 2

• syllable congruency effect when the phonology of the initial segment (e.g., po) matches the pronunciation of the whole word (e.g., pony) only for the congruent condition

• no syllable congruency effect when the first segment of the congruent condition is pronounced the same as the incongruent condition

Discussion • English readers do not parse words into syllables

during visual word recognition • manipulations that highlight the syllable can help

obtain accurate phonology • Experiment 1: picnic vs picnic • Experiment 2: pony vs pony

• no syllable sized units in English

Discussion

• phonological information may become more detailed over time (Frost, 1998) • phonological syllable information available later in

English word recognition

• CDP++ model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010)

Thank You