Accent mark and visual word recognition in Spanish

Sandra Schwab

doi:10.3989/loquens.2015.018

Abstract

The present research aims at determining to what extent an orthographic error related to the accent mark affects the visual recognition of Spanish words. For this, we conducted two experiments of visual lexical decision (with no word production), in which Spanish-speaking participants were instructed to ignore the presence or the absence of the accent mark. Stimuli were composed of words originally without accent mark ( OrNA for ‘originally no accent’; Experiment 1) and words originally with an accent mark ( OrWA for ‘originally with accent’; Experiments 1 and 2). OrNA words were presented in three conditions: correctly spelled (e.g., dulce ‘sweet’), with an added accent mark on the lexically stressed vowel ( dulce ) and with a misplaced accent mark on the lexically non-stressed vowel ( dulce ). Along the same line, OrWA words were also presented in three conditions: correctly spelled (e.g., lapiz ‘pen’), without the accent mark ( lapiz ) and with a misplaced accent mark ( lapiz ). Taken together, the results showed that the accent mark plays a role in the visual word recognition in Spanish. More specifically, the addition and/or the misplacement of an accent mark significantly slow down the visual recognition of the words, whereas the omission of the accent mark does not. The findings are discussed within the framework of dual-route models.

Highlights

The emergence of social networking sites, internet chat rooms or mobile messaging applications brings to light an increasing use of variant spellings (e.g., Eisenstein, 2013)
Given that stress assignment in word production in Spanish has been very little examined, we report some studies on Greek and Italian, since these two languages share with Spanish some accentual properties and orthographic characteristics
This experiment aimed at examining the role of the accent mark in the visual word recognition in Spanish

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of social networking sites, internet chat rooms or mobile messaging applications brings to light an increasing use of variant spellings (e.g., Eisenstein, 2013). Users of these applications type their messages quickly and generally do not consider that they need to correct typos or to conform to spelling rules (e.g., The English Spelling Society, 2010). The question arises whether an orthographic error relating to the accent mark affects the visual recognition of a Spanish word. In other words, are the Spanish-speaking readers hampered by accent mark errors?

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Results

Conclusion