This study investigates the role of probabilistic phonotactics in the processing of consonant clusters (as opposed to consonant-vowel sequences) and of complex words (as opposed to monomorphemic words) in two experiments of visual word recognition with masked fragment priming. Target words are more efficiently recognized when the transition probabilities between an initial fragment and the following segment in the target are high, but this effect is not equally distributed across all areas of the phonology. It was found that speakers rely more heavily on transition probabilities between segments of a consonant cluster than between segments of a consonant-vowel sequence. The morphemic integrity of the cluster is also a relevant parameter in predicting the role of probabilistic phonotactics in lexical access, with prefixed items showing a stronger facilitatory effect than pseudoprefixed items. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that phonotactic probabilities are relevant in visual word recognition, and that their effects interact with higher order linguistic information. These findings also enrich our view of the selection-and-competition mechanism that governs written word processing by providing direct evidence of the fact that the speakers anticipate the segment to the right based on implicit knowledge of phonotactic probabilities.

这项研究调查了在两个带有掩盖片段启动的视觉单词识别实验中，概率音位策略在处理辅音簇（与辅音元音序列相对）和复杂单词（与单态单词相对）中的作用。当目标中的初始片段和后续片段之间的过渡概率很高时，可以更有效地识别目标单词，但是这种效果不会在语音系统的所有区域中平均分配。发现说话者比辅音元音序列的片段之间更依赖于辅音簇的片段之间的过渡概率。集群的语素完整性也是预测概率音位策略在词汇访问中的作用的相关参数，带前缀的项目比伪前缀的项目显示更强的促进作用。综上所述，这些发现表明，语音音位概率与视觉单词识别相关，并且它们的作用与高阶语言信息相互作用。这些发现还通过提供直接的事实证明，即说话者根据音位学概率的隐含知识来预料到右边的句段这一事实，丰富了我们对选择词和竞争机制的看法，该机制控制着书面文字处理。