Özkan Zeynep G, Özdemir Berceste, Gómez Pablo, Perea Manuel
ERI-Lectura and Department of Methodology, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
Psychology Department, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2025 Aug;78(8):1539-1546. doi: 10.1177/17470218241277683. Epub 2024 Sep 13.
Vowel harmony is a phenomenon in which the vowels in a word share some features (e.g., frontness vs. backness). It occurs in several families of languages (e.g., Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages) and serves as an effective segmenting cue in continuous speech and when reading compound words. The present study examined whether vowel harmony also plays a role in visual word recognition. We chose Turkish, a language with four front and four back vowels in which approximately 75% of words are harmonious. If vowel harmony contributes to the formation of coherent phonological codes during lexical access, harmonious words will reach a stable orthographic-phonological state more rapidly than disharmonious words. To test this hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we selected two types of monomorphemic Turkish words: harmonious (containing only front vowels or back vowels) and disharmonious (containing front and back vowels)-a parallel manipulation was applied to the pseudowords. Results showed faster lexical decisions for harmonious than disharmonious words, whereas vowel harmony did not affect pseudowords. In Experiment 2, where all words were harmonious, we found a small but reliable advantage for disharmonious over harmonious pseudowords. These findings suggest that vowel harmony helps the formation of stable phonological codes in Turkish words, but it does not play a key role in pseudoword rejection.
元音和谐是一种单词中的元音共享某些特征（如前元音与后元音）的现象。它出现在几个语系中（如突厥语系和芬兰-乌戈尔语系），并且在连续语音和阅读复合词时作为一种有效的切分线索。本研究考察了元音和谐在视觉单词识别中是否也起作用。我们选择了土耳其语，这是一种有四个前元音和四个后元音的语言，其中大约75%的单词是和谐的。如果元音和谐在词汇通达过程中有助于连贯语音代码的形成，那么和谐单词将比不和谐单词更快地达到稳定的正字法-语音状态。为了验证这一假设，在实验1中，我们选择了两种类型的单语素土耳其语单词：和谐的（只包含前元音或后元音）和不和谐的（包含前元音和后元音）——对伪词也进行了类似的操作。结果显示，和谐单词的词汇判断速度比不和谐单词快，而元音和谐对伪词没有影响。在实验2中，所有单词都是和谐的，我们发现不和谐伪词比和谐伪词有一个小但可靠的优势。这些发现表明，元音和谐有助于土耳其语单词中稳定语音代码的形成，但在拒绝伪词方面不起关键作用。
