Abstract
AbstractAlthough the Latin-based orthographies of most Western languages employ vowels with accent marks (e.g., é vs. e), extant models of letter and word recognition are agnostic as to whether these accented letters and their non-accented counterparts are represented by common or separate abstract units. Recent research in French with a masked priming alphabetic decision task was interpreted as favoring the idea that accented and non-accented vowels are represented by separate abstract orthographic units (orthographic account: é↛e and e↛é; Chetail & Boursain, 2019). However, a more parsimonious explanation is that salient (accented) vowels are less perceptually similar to non-salient (non-accented) vowels than vice versa (perceptual account: e→é, but é↛e; Perea et al., 2021a; Tversky, 1977). To adjudicate between the two accounts, we conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment in Catalan, a language with a complex orthography-to-phonology mapping for non-accented vowels (e.g., e→/e/, /ə/, /ε/). Results showed faster responses in the identity than in the visually similar condition for accented targets (é–É < e–É), but not for non-accented targets (e–E = é–E). Neither of the above accounts can fully capture this pattern. We propose an explanation based on the rapid activation of both orthographic and phonological codes.
Highlights
Towards a comprehensive model of letter/word recognition Contemporary neurally inspired hierarchical models of letter and word recognition (e.g., Dehaene et al, 2005; Grainger et al, 2008; Schubert & McCloskey, 2013) assume that information from the visual features of letters gradually vanishes during letter/word recognition
At a layer of abstract letter detectors, the vowels e, e, and E would be processed alike. These abstract letter units would be mapped onto local bigrams (e.g., TE, EN, or NT) and, onto word units (e.g., TENT; see Dehaene et al, 2005, Figure 1)
Bear in mind that these models were designed for English, which is the only major European language lacking accent marks—note that the Ans et al (1998) model, which was created for French, assumes different abstract letter units for accented and non-accented vowels
Summary
Towards a comprehensive model of letter/word recognition Contemporary neurally inspired hierarchical models of letter and word recognition (e.g., Dehaene et al, 2005; Grainger et al, 2008; Schubert & McCloskey, 2013) assume that information from the visual features of letters gradually vanishes during letter/word recognition. There are no a priori reasons to believe that accented and non-accented vowels in Spanish would activate separate orthographic representations (see Chetail & Boursain, 2019) In their masked priming alphabetic decision experiment, Perea et al (2020) included both accented and non-accented vowels as targets. Response times were virtually the same in the identity and visually similar conditions, which, in turn, were faster than in the visually different condition (e.g., é–É = e–É < a–É) This pattern favors the view that, in Spanish, accented and non-accented vowels share their abstract letter representations (see Marcet & Perea, 2021, for converging evidence during sentence reading). Catalan language may provide a very stringent test to separate the predictions of the perceptual and orthographic accounts
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