Abstract
Recent research with skilled adult readers has consistently revealed an advantage of consonants over vowels in visual-word recognition (i.e., the so-called “consonant bias”). Nevertheless, little is known about how early in development the consonant bias emerges. This work aims to address this issue by studying the relative contribution of consonants and vowels at the early stages of visual-word recognition in developing readers (2nd and 4th Grade children) and skilled adult readers (college students) using a masked priming lexical decision task. Target words starting either with a consonant or a vowel were preceded by a briefly presented masked prime (50 ms) that could be the same as the target (e.g., pirata-PIRATA [pirate-PIRATE]), a consonant-preserving prime (e.g., pureto-PIRATA), a vowel-preserving prime (e.g., gicala-PIRATA), or an unrelated prime (e.g., bocelo -PIRATA). Results revealed significant priming effects for the identity and consonant-preserving conditions in adult readers and 4th Grade children, whereas 2nd graders only showed priming for the identity condition. In adult readers, the advantage of consonants was observed both for words starting with a consonant or a vowel, while in 4th graders this advantage was restricted to words with an initial consonant. Thus, the present findings suggest that a Consonant/Vowel skeleton should be included in future (developmental) models of visual-word recognition and reading.
Highlights
The written symbols that represent the sounds of spoken language in the Greek/Latin alphabets can be traced back to the Phoenician script, in which only the consonants were represented in print
The experiments reported in this paper address this issue being, to the best of our knowledge, the first that aims to track the emergence of the consonant bias at the early stages of visual-word recognition in developing readers
We found faster recognition times for target words preceded by consonantal information than for target words preceded by vocalic information regardless of the initial letter in the word, replicating the New et al [8] findings in European Portuguese (EP)
Summary
The written symbols that represent the sounds of spoken language in the Greek/Latin alphabets (i.e., consonants and vowels) can be traced back to the Phoenician script (an extinct Semitic language), in which only the consonants were represented in print. Other Semitic languages like Hebrew or Arabic only employ consonantal information in writing, except for some long vowels. This may be taken to suggest that consonants may be more important than vowels during lexical access. Using a lexical decision task with briefly presented (50 ms) forwardly masked primes, the authors employed nonword primes that preserved either the consonants (e.g., duvo) or the vowels (e.g., rifa) of the target words (e.g., DIVA) – identical (e.g., diva-DIVA) and unrelated (e.g., rufo-DIVA) nonword primes were introduced as controls. New et al [8] concluded that ‘‘lexical representations are accessed more reliably through consonantal than vocalic information’’ (p. 1226), and established the presence of a consonant bias at early stages of visual-word recognition in adult readers
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