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Syllable-sized units in visual word recognition: Evidence from skilled and beginning readers of French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 1999

Pascale Colé ,
Magnan Annie  and
Jonathan Grainger
Pascale Colé*
Affiliation:
René Descartes University
Magnan Annie
Affiliation:
University of Lyon 2
Jonathan Grainger
Affiliation:
University of Provence
*
Pascale Colé, Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, Université René Descartes, 71 avenue Edouard Vaillant, 92774 Boulogne Billancourt Cédex, France. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The experiments presented here used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981) to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable (e.g., BA) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., BALANCE). The target was either a consonant–vowel (CV) or consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. Skilled adult readers showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets corresponded to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not), but this occurred only when the carrier words had low printed frequencies. First grade readers did not show a syllable compatibility effect when tested in February of the first year of schooling; only target length influenced detection times. When tested four months later (June), however, the children with the highest scores on a reading ability test did show a syllable compatibility effect. These results suggest that reading instruction rapidly allows syllable-sized units to be accessed from print, and that this type of coding continues to influence how adult readers process low frequency words.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 507 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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