Are goats chèvres, chévres, chēvres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels. - Université Lumière Lyon 2
Article Dans Une Revue (Data Paper) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Année : 2022

Are goats chèvres, chévres, chēvres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels.

Résumé

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visualword recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä /ɛ/ and a /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chêvre) or not (the macron sign, as in chēvre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact non-diacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (chēval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels.

Domaines

Psychologie
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Dates et versions

hal-03997744 , version 1 (20-02-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Melanie Labusch, Stéphanie Massol, Ana Marcet, Manuel Perea. Are goats chèvres, chévres, chēvres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2022, 49 (2), pp.301-319. ⟨10.1037/xlm0001212⟩. ⟨hal-03997744⟩

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