A PHONEME EFFECT IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

In alphabetic writing systems like English or French, many words are c omposed of more letters than phonemes (e.g. BEACH is composed of five letters and three phonemes, i.e. /biJ/). This is due to the presence o f higher order graphemes, that is, groups of letters that map into a s ingle phoneme (e.g, EA and CH in BEACH map into the single phonemes /i / and /J/, respectively). The present study investigated the potential role of these subsyllabic components for the visual recognition of wo rds in a perceptual identification task. In Experiment 1, we manipulat ed the number of phonemes in monosyllabic, low frequency, five-letter, English words, and found that identification times were longer for wo rds with a small number of phonemes than for words with a large number of phonemes. In Experiment 2, this 'phoneme effect' was replicated in French for low frequency, but not for high frequency, monosyllabic wo rds. These results suggest that subsyllabic components, also referred to as functional orthographic units, play a crucial role as elementary building blocks of visual word recognition (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.