Sublexical units in English word recognition

Abstract

A body of evidence suggest that when reading we make use of sublexical units more complex than single letters but that the structure of the language determines the nature of the sublexical unit utilised. Languages with a shallow orthography (i.e. those where the pronunciation of a word is completely predictable from its spelling) such as Spanish and Norwegian appear to be read by recourse to syllabic units. However this effect is weaker in languages with a deeper orthography, such as French, and has not been demonstrated in English. Preliminary data in English provides evidence for a facilitatory influence of an orthographically defined "syllable" the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS). In this study we examined the role of BOSS in reading English. Two experiments were conducted, a lexical decision task and a naming task. It was hypothesised that for both tasks, response times for English words with a high frequency BOSS would be faster than those with a low frequency BOSS. The results support the hypothesis suggesting that the BOSS is a sublexical unit in reading English although its role is different to the syllable in shallow orthographies. These findings have implications for all models of reading alphabetic languages.