Content area
Full text
The syllable plays a key role in lexical access during reading in several languages. A remarkable phenomenon is that words composed of high-frequency syllables produce longer reaction times and more errors than words with less frequent syllables (Carreiras, Álvarez, & de Vega, 1993). This is known as the inhibitory effect of positional syllable frequency (PSF). The PSF inhibitory effect was first documented in Spanish (Carreiras et al., 1993) and has been replicated in German (Conrad & Jacobs, 2004), French (Mathey & Zagar, 2002), and Portuguese (Morais, Content, Cary, Mehler, & Seguí, 1989).
The PSF inhibitory effect implies a connection between graphemes, phonemes, the initial syllable, and the mental lexicon, so it has been taken as an indicator of the acquisition of word reading skills. Results from studies in French and Spanish have suggested that the inhibitory effect requires a long period of reading experience, beyond the 5th grade (e.g., Maïonchi-Pino, Magnan, & Écalle, 2010a, 2010b). However, two striking findings challenge the idea that the inhibitory effect requires a high level of reading experience. Goikoetxea (2005) found inhibitory effects in a sample of 1st-grade Spanish readers. In the same line, Luque, López-Zamora, Álvarez, and Bordoy (2013) found large magnitude effects on 2nd- and 4th-grade Spanish poor readers. The main goal of this paper is to examine whether the inhibitory effect requires a long period of experience to build up automatic and fast connections between words and syllables, or if it relies on early settled structural properties of the lexical access system.
An accepted theoretical framework explains the inhibitory effect through two main processes: the activation and competition of the lexical candidates (e.g., Jacobs, Rey, Ziegler, & Grainger, 1998). When a printed word is read, a sublexical orthographic code generates activation of the corresponding set of phoneme representations. As Perry, Ziegler and Zorzi (2010) stated, the phonological representation of a word is not a linear string of phonemes. By contrast, words are rather structured into their syllabic constituents. These syllabic representations are phonologically defined, therefore they only receive bottom-up activation from phoneme representations (e.g., Álvarez, Carreiras, & Perea, 2004). As syllabic representations activate polysyllabic words that share the initial syllable, high syllable frequencies are associated with the activation of a greater number of words that compete with...