Are Goats "Chèvres," "Chévres," "Chevres," and "Chevres"? Unveiling the Orthographic Code of Diacritical Vowels

Autor/inn/en	Labusch, Melanie; Massol, Stéphanie; Marcet, Ana; Perea, Manuel
Titel	Are Goats "Chèvres," "Chévres," "Chevres," and "Chevres"? Unveiling the Orthographic Code of Diacritical Vowels
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 49 (2023) 2, S.301-319 (19 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Perea, Manuel)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0278-7393
DOI	10.1037/xlm0001212
Schlagwörter	Vowels; Distinctive Features (Language); French; Pronunciation; Word Recognition; Reading Processes; Alphabets; Suprasegmentals; Phonology; Phonemes; Comparative Analysis; Semantics; Classification; Task Analysis; Contrastive Linguistics; Reaction Time; Accuracy + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Französisch; Aussprache; Worterkennung; Leseprozess; Buchstabenschrift; Fonologie; Fonem; Semantik; Classification system; Klassifikation; Klassifikationssystem; Aufgabenanalyse; Linguistics; Kontrastive Linguistik; Reaktionsvermögen
Abstract	An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.[voiced alveolar tap or flap]a] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä /[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/ and a /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chevre) or not (the macron sign, as in chevre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (cheval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01