On the syllable structure effect in european portuguese: evidence from ERPs

Syllable effects during visual word recognition have been observed for CV but not for CVC syllables, a puzzling effect that is not explained either by the distributional frequencies of CV and CVC syllables, syllable complexity, or syllabic neighbourhood density. Furthermore, in European Portuguese (EP), syllable effects have not been found for pseudowords, suggesting that syllable activation might not precede lexical activation. Here, we combined a colour-congruency lexical decision task with the collection of electroencephalographic (EEG) data to investigate syllable effects in EP for CV and CVC words and pseudowords, with the latter presenting a match (CVCO+P+) or a mismatch (CVCO+P-) between their orthographic (O) and phonological (P) syllable structure to further ascertain the locus (i.e., orthographic and/or phonological) of syllable effects. Results showed syllable congruency effects in the N100, P200, and N400 ERP components for CV and CVC words suggesting the influence of different factors underlying the syllable structure effect.This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662) , University of Minho, and was supported by the Grant PD/BD/128464/2017 and also by the Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028212 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds, and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. Eduardo Lopez-Caneda was supported by the FCT and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, within the scope of the In-dividual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEECIND/02979/2018)