Are Goats Chèvres, Chévres, Chēvres, and Chevres? Unveiling the Orthographic Code of Diacritical Vowels

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2023-02, Vol.49 (2), p.301-319
• Main Authors: Labusch, Melanie, Massol, Stéphanie, Marcet, Ana, Perea, Manuel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accuracy; Alphabets; Animals; Classification; Cognitive science; Comparative Analysis; Contrastive Linguistics; Distinctive Features (Language); English language; Female; French; French language; German language; Goats; Horses; Human; Humans; Language; Male; Mental Lexicon; Orthographic symbols; Orthography; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Phonemes; Phonetics; Phonology; Pronunciation; Psychology; Reaction Time; Reading; Reading Processes; Semantic categories; Semantics; Spanish language; Suprasegmentals; Task Analysis; Vowels; Word Recognition
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/xlm0001212

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä /ɛ/ and a /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chêvre) or not (the macron sign, as in chēvre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (chēval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels.