Syntactic control of letter detection: Evidence from English and Hebrew nonwords.

Abstract

According to the unitization account, letters are more often missed in function words (e.g., the) than in less common content words because their higher familiarity allows access to their whole-word representations. The present study, however, replicated this pattern with nonwords. For both Hebrew and English, nonwords produced more detection errors when placed in function slots than in content slots. A similar effect was found for Hebrew prefix nonwords, where the initial letter could be interpreted as a function morpheme or as part of the stem