Effects of syllable-frequency in lexical decision and naming: an eye-movement study

In three experiments we explored task-specific effects of syllable-frequency, following Perea and Carreiras' (1998) findings of a facilitative effect during naming and an inhibitory effect during lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency on articulation duration suggested a process-specific effect during naming: a facilitative effect on construction of phonological output, but an inhibitory effect on lexical access. Eye-movement recording was used in Experiment 2 to disentangle these two processes. An inhibitory effect on eye-movement parameters during both lexical decision and naming supported the assumption that higher first syllable-frequency inhibits lexical access. Implications of a general inhibitory effect of syllable-frequency for computational models of word recognition, specifically for the multiple-trace memory (MTM) model of polysyllabic word naming (Ans, Carbonnel, & Valdois, 1998), are discussed.