The role of nasals in reading: A normative study in French

Dual-route models of reading assume that reading can be done in two ways. A most common lexical route, on the one hand, allows regular and irregular w ords to be read while a second sublexical route allows nonwords and novel w ords to be read. A graphemic processing stage in sublexical reading is assu med to assemble the individual letters of a word or a nonword into multilet ter graphemes prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. The purpose of this stu dy was to determine whether vowel/nasal clusters required as much time to b e processed as vowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters in sublexical n onword reading in French. Results indicate that nonwords that contain vowel /nasal clusters are read significantly faster than nonwords comprising vowe l/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters. Furthermore, nonwords that contai n single-letter graphemes are read significantly faster than nonwords compr ising vowel/nasal clusters and nonwords comprising vowel/vowel and consonan t/consonant clusters. These results taken as a whole support the idea that nasals act as diacritic marks rather than being processed by means of a gra phemic parsing procedure. (C) 2001 Academic Press.