Muncer Steven J, Knight David C
Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Queen's Campus, Thornaby-on-Tees, TS17 6BH, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2012;65(11):2221-30. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.697176. Epub 2012 Jul 17.
There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various word processing tasks. It has, however, been suggested that syllable effects may be caused by orthographic redundancy. In particular, it has been proposed that the presence of bigram troughs at syllable boundaries cause what are seen as syllable effects. We investigated the bigram trough hypothesis as an explanation of the number of syllables effect for lexical decision in five-letter words and nonwords from the British Lexicon Project. The number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times along with word frequency and orthographic similarity. The presence of a bigram trough did not. For nonwords, the number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times only for nonwords with relatively long decision times. The presence of a bigram trough made no contribution. The evidence presented suggests that the bigram trough cannot be an explanation of the syllable number effect in lexical decision. A comparison of the results from words and nonwords is interpreted as providing some support for dual-route models of reading.
越来越多的证据支持音节在各种单词处理任务中的作用。然而，有人提出音节效应可能是由正字法冗余引起的。特别是，有人提出在音节边界处双字母组低谷的存在导致了所谓的音节效应。我们研究了双字母组低谷假说，以此来解释英国词汇项目中五字母单词和非单词的词汇判断中音节数量效应。音节数量以及单词频率和正字法相似度对词汇判断时间的预测有显著贡献。双字母组低谷的存在则没有。对于非单词，音节数量仅对决策时间相对较长的非单词的词汇判断时间预测有显著贡献。双字母组低谷的存在没有贡献。所呈现的证据表明，双字母组低谷不能解释词汇判断中的音节数量效应。对单词和非单词结果的比较被解释为为阅读的双通道模型提供了一些支持。
