Illusory conjunctions in French: The nature of sublexical units in visual word recognition

The respective influence of orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg, 1987) and syllable boundaries (Rapp, 1992) on reading units in French was tested in three experiments, using the illusory conjunction paradigm (Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986). Bigram boundaries were defined according to bigram frequencies. The data showed that the syllable effect was attenuated or cancelled when syllable boundaries did not coincide with bigram boundaries. Reading units were defined by syllable and orthographic information. The implications of such findings for the dual route theory and the PDP model are discussed.

Got rhythm… for better and for worse. Cross-modal effects of auditory rhythm on visual word recognition

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory sequence was played in a loop. The first group of letters could either be congruent with the syllabic division of the word (e.g. val in val/se) or not (e.g. va in va/lse). In agreement with the Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT), our results confirmed that the presentation of the correct first syllable on-beat (i.e. in synchrony with a peak of covert attentio…

Auditory attentional entrainment modulates the holistic perception of faces

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.

International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…

Evidence for Early Closure Attachment on First Pass Reading Times in French

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of the form “N V N1of-N2 who …” Example: “A journalist approached the barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (masculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.” The results are consistent with those of Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). French readers, like Spanish readers, prefer early closure (and are garden-pathed when the sentence turns out to be a late-closure attachment). This effect was exhibited by first-pass reading times that are usually assumed to reflect initial syntactic commitments. These results are discussed in relation to Frazier and Clifton's recent proposals concerning attachment me…

How is Visual Recognition Entrained by Auditory Background Rhythms?

AbstractRecent studies have reported that the oscillations of auditory attention entrained by a background rhythmic sequence can influence performance in visual recognition tasks. We have designed an experimental paradigm in which a visual item (either a bisyllabic word or a familiar face) is displayed on screen in two consecutive parts while a musical rhythm is played in the background. Depending on the timing conditions, the first or the second part of the item could be presented either in-synchrony or out-of-synchrony with the beats of the auditory rhythm. In a first series of experiments, participants performed a lexical decision task on bisyllabic 5-letter strings. Results show that wh…

When WORDS with Higher-frequency Neighbours Become Words with No Higher-frequency Neighbour (Or How to Undress the Neighbourhood Frequency Effect)

Abstract “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS” (The ploughman, with his plough, manages the work) The influence of lexical similarity on word recognition has been discussed not only because of its theoretical impact but also because it is difficult to replicate. Among the multiplicity of the causes of this inconsistency one reason can be that different words were used in comparing words with higher-frequency neighbours (HFN) and words without HFN. In this experiment we chose French words for which the neighbourhood changes when they are written in UPPER case or in lower case. For example ‘DEFI’ has one HFN (‘DEMI’) but when it is displayed in lower case ‘defi’ has no HFN because ‘demi’ has no acc…

Can we see syllables in monosyllabic words? A study with illusory conjunctions

Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, and Seigneuric (2006) reported an inhibitory effect of syllabic neighbourhood in monosyllabic French words suggesting that syllable units mediate the access to lexical representations of monosyllabic stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of syllable units in monosyllabic stimuli. The illusory conjunction paradigm was used to examine perceptual groupings of letters. Experiment 1 showed that potential syllables in monosyllabic French words (e.g., BI in BICHE) affected the pattern of illusory conjunctions. Experiment 2 indicated that the perceptual parsing in monosyllabic items was due to syllable information and orthographic redundancy. …

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

International audience; We investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The results failed to show a pure syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 2a and b, syllabic neighbourhood and bigram frequency were factorially manipulated. The interaction showed that the syllabic neighbourhood effect was inhibitory when bigram frequency was high, whereas it wa…

L’état émotionnel affecte-t-il les performances à une tâche de chronométrie mentale ?

International audience

Neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming in the lexical decision task

Lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were used with a masked priming procedure to test whether neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming. Word targets had either ‘single’ neighbours when their two higher frequency orthographic neighbours were spread over letter positions (e.g., neighbours of LOBE: robe-loge) or ‘twin’ neighbours when they were concentrated on a single letter position (e.g., neighbours of FARD: lard-tard). All word targets were preceded by their highest frequency orthographic neighbour or by a control prime. An inhibitory priming effect was found for words with single neighbours, but not for words with twin neighbours, in both a yes/no LDT (Experiment 1a) and a…

Les enfants en cours d'apprentissage de la lecture perçoivent-ils la syllabe à l'écrit?

L'objectif de cette recherche etait de tester si les apprentis lecteurs (6-7 a 7-8 ans) et les lecteurs debutants (8-9 a 10-11 ans) percoivent les unites syllabiques dans les mots ecrits. Le paradigme des conjonctions illusoires a ete utilise parce qu'il permet de determiner les unites infralexicales identifiees dans les premieres etapes de traitement des stimuli ecrits. Deux experiences ont ete conduites chez les enfants de la premiere (6-7 ans) a la derniere annee d'acquisition de la lecture (10-11 ans). Les resultats ont montre que les enfants percoivent les syllabes dans des suites de lettres des la fin de la premiere annee d'apprentissage de la lecture. La perception de ces unites resu…