Syllable structure is modulating the optimal viewing position in visual word recognition

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate in cognitive psychology as to whether syllables have to be seen as functional units not only for speech perception and production, but also for the process of silent reading or visual word recognition. For the present study, we used a perceptive identification task where single disyllabic 5-letter German words were briefly presented to the participants for 50 or 60 milliseconds. The percentage of errors in identifying these stimuli was the dependent variable. During presentation in the experiment we manipulated the viewing position for these items, so that initial fixation for each repeatedly presented word varied systematically across all five letter positions. Typically, for such manipulations, word recognition is best when initial fixation is at a position slightly left from the word center — a finding referred to as the optimal viewing position effect. We found that the shape of the optimal viewing position function is sensitive to syllabic structure: The optimal viewing position shifted one letter position to the right with increasing initial syllable length (two vs. three letters in our stimulus material). This finding suggests that efficient reading benefits from a very early processing of syllabic information. It corroborates other recent empirical findings suggesting that also during silent reading orthographic word forms are automatically segmented into their syllabic constituents.