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Updated: Jul 11, 2026

Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology
Published on: June 29, 2021
Phonology as the source of syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition: evidence from French
Markus Conrad1, Jonathan Grainger, Arhur M Jacobs
1Department of General Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany. markus_conrad@gmx.de
Abstract:
In order to investigate whether syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition can be attributed to phonologically or orthographically defined syllables, we designed one experiment that allowed six critical comparisons. Whereas only a weak effect was obtained when both orthographic and phonological syllable frequency were conjointly manipulated in Comparison 1, robust effects for phonological and null effects for orthographic syllable frequency were found in Comparisons 2 and 3. Comparisons 4 and 5 showed that the syllable frequency effect does not result from a confound with the frequency of letter or phoneme clusters at the beginning of words. The syllable frequency effect was shown to diminish with increasing word frequency in Comparison 6. These results suggest that visually presented polysyllabic words are parsed into phonologically defined syllables during visual word recognition. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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