Prior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and ñ. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muñeca-type words (muneca-MUÑECA < museca-MUÑECA), but not for moneda-type words (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.

中文翻译：

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墨西哥胡椒或墨西哥胡椒：辅音字母中的变音符号会在单词识别过程中调节视觉相似性效果吗？

先前的研究表明，单词识别时间牙医当前面有一个视觉上相似的素数（牙医;一世↔j) 比前面有一个视觉上不同的素数 (牙医）。然而，当关键字母在变音符号中不同时，这些视觉相似性的影响不会出现在阿拉伯字母中：对于目标视觉上相似的一个字母取代了素数（比较和并不比视觉上不同的单字母替换素数更有效在这里，我们检查了这种分离模式是否是由于变音符号在文字处理过程中的特殊作用。我们使用包含两个辅音之一的目标词用西班牙语进行了蒙面启动词汇决策实验，这些辅音仅在是否存在变音符号时有所不同：n和ñ. 主要目标条件是同一性、视觉上相似和视觉上不同。结果表明，对于 muñeca 类型的单词，视觉相似的条件优于视觉不同的条件（muneca-MUÑECA<穆塞卡-MUÑECA)，但不适用于 moneda 类型的单词 (莫涅达-莫内达=摩塞达-MONEDA）。因此，变音符号是在处理的最初时刻发挥特殊作用的显着元素，从而限制了视觉单词识别模型中“特征”和“字母”级别之间的相互作用。