Lupker, S. J. 1 , Acha, J. 2 , Davis, C. J. 3 & Perea, M. 4
1 University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Donostia, Spain
3 Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
4 Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain
In most current models of word recognition, word units are assumed to be activated by letter units. An alternative possibility is that word units are activated by grapheme units, that is, that graphemes, rather than letters, are the building blocks of reading. If so, there must be representational units for letter pairs like “ch” and “ph” in the system. We examined this idea in four masked priming experiments. Primes were created by transposing, replacing entirely or removing one component of either multi-letter graphemes or two adjacent letters that each represented a grapheme, with both English and Spanish stimuli. In none of the experiments was there any evidence of differential priming effects depending on whether the two letters being manipulated formed a single grapheme or formed two separate graphemes. These data are most consistent with the idea that multi-letter graphemes have no special status at the earliest stages of word processing and, therefore, that word units are, indeed, activated by units for individual letters.