Chetail, F. & Content, A.
LCLD, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
The nature of functional orthographic units is a central issue in visual word recognition, especially with long multisyllabic words. Although syllable-sized units appear plausible and their role is supported by various strands of evidence, the processes and the cues determining orthographic grouping remain far from clear. Here, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings by examining French readers’ judgements of syllabic length. Participants were presented with written words matched for the number of spoken syllables and comprising a vowel hiatus or not (e.g. pharaon vs. vagabond). Relative to control words, readers were slower and less accurate for hiatus words for which they systematically underestimated the number of syllables (Experiment 1). The effect was stronger when the instructions emphasized response speed (Experiment 2). It was even more pronounced when the resort to phonological codes was hindered through articulatory suppression (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results show that the perceptual units extracted from visual letter strings and from spoken words need not correspond to each other. We discuss the implications of this lack of isomorphism between spoken syllables and orthographic units in view of current theories of visual and spoken word recognition.