Syllable Frequency and Visual Word Recognition in Spanish

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the syllable as a sublexical representational unit during visual word recognition in a shallow language: Spanish. Five experiments were carried out to test the effect of the frequency of the syllables on naming latencies and lexical decision times. The orthographic redundancy hypothesis (Seidenberg, 1987, 1989) claims that the effects of syllabic structure are merely illusory and that they can be explained as effects deriving from the frequency of cooccurrence of letter patterns. The reliable effects of syllabic frequency that we found cannot be accounted by the frequency of cooccurrence of letter patterns. The implications of such findings for the dual route theory and for the PDP model proposed by Seidenberg and McClelland are discussed.