Syllables and morphemes: contrasting frequency effects in Spanish

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Visual word recognition involves processing sublexical units.
• The roles of syllable, basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS), and root morpheme frequencies in Spanish are debated.
• Existing models face challenges in integrating different sublexical units.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of syllable, BOSS, and root morpheme frequencies on Spanish visual word recognition.
• To determine which sublexical unit (syllable, BOSS, or morpheme) best predicts word recognition.
• To assess the adequacy of current models in explaining these effects.

Main Methods:

• Lexical-decision tasks were employed across multiple experiments.
• Experiment 1 manipulated first-syllable frequency and BOSS frequency.
• Experiments 2, 3A, and 3B manipulated BOSS frequency and root morpheme frequency, controlling for word frequency and syllable frequency respectively.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 showed an inhibitory effect of first-syllable frequency and a word-frequency effect.
• Experiment 2 revealed facilitatory effects of both BOSS frequency and word frequency.
• Experiments 3A and 3B indicated a facilitatory effect of root morpheme frequency and a null effect of BOSS frequency when controlling for morpheme frequency, suggesting a morpheme effect.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that root morpheme frequency plays a significant role in Spanish visual word recognition.
• The basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS) effect appears to be driven by morpheme frequency rather than orthographic structure alone.
• Current computational models need refinement to effectively integrate both syllable and morpheme levels of processing.