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Syllable effects in beginning and intermediate European-Portuguese readers: Evidence from a sandwich masked go/no-go lexical decision task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2020

Ana Duarte CAMPOS Open the ORCID record for Ana Duarte CAMPOS [Opens in a new window] ,
Helena Mendes OLIVEIRA  and
Ana Paula SOARES
Ana Duarte CAMPOS*
Affiliation:
Research Unit in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, Minho University, Braga, Portugal
Helena Mendes OLIVEIRA
Affiliation:
Research Unit in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, Minho University, Braga, Portugal
Ana Paula SOARES
Affiliation:
Research Unit in Psycholinguistics, CIPsi, School of Psychology, Minho University, Braga, Portugal
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: [email protected]
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Abstract

Reading is one of the most important milestones a child achieves throughout development. Above the letter level, the syllable has been shown to play a relevant role at early stages of visual word recognition in adult skilled readers. However, studies aiming to examine when, during reading acquisition, the syllable emerges as a functional sublexical unit are scarce, and the studies conducted so far have led to inconsistent results. In this work, beginning and intermediate European-Portuguese (EP) developing readers performed a sandwich masked lexical decision task in which CV (e.g., RU.MOR[rumour]) and CVC (e.g., CIS.NE[swan]) first-syllable EP words were preceded either by syllable congruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, cis.ra-CIS.NE), syllable incongruent (e.g., rum.ba-RU.MOR, ci.ser-CIS.NE), unrelated (e.g., va.cra-RU.MOR, zar.vo-CIS.NE) pseudowords primes, or identity (e.g., ru.mour-RU.MOUR, cis.ne-CIS.NE) primes. Results showed reliable syllable effects only for intermediate readers and for CV and CVC words alike. Findings are discussed attending to current models of visual word recognition.

Keywords

Syllable effectsdeveloping readersvisual word recognitionmasked priming
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , July 2021 , pp. 699 - 716
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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