ABSTRACT

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish because, unlike French, accented and non-accented vowels only convey stress information. We conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment and a masked priming lexical decision experiment, each with three priming conditions (identity, visually similar, visually dissimilar). Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition. Furthermore, for non-accented primes, the visually similar condition was as effective as the identity condition. Thus, these findings suggest that: 1) accented and non-accented vowels share their abstract letter representations in Spanish; and 2) the nature of orthographic representations is molded by the characteristics of each language.

摘要

大多数拼字法都包含重音元音和非重音元音。但是，它们是作为同一字母单元的变体还是作为单独的抽象单元处理的？法语的最新研究表明，重音元音似乎是作为单独的单元处理的。在这里，我们检查了这种现象是普遍的还是特定于语言的。我们选择西班牙语是因为与法语不同，带重音和不带重音的元音仅传达压力信息。我们进行了蒙版启动字母顺序的决策实验和蒙版启动词汇词典的决策实验，每个实验都具有三个启动条件（身份，视觉相似，视觉不同）。结果表明，视觉相似条件优于视觉相似条件。此外，对于非重音素数，视觉上相似的条件与身份条件一样有效。从而，这些发现表明：1）重音和非重音元音以西班牙语共享其抽象字母表示；2）正交表达的性质是由每种语言的特征所塑造的。