Cognitive processes underlying the syllabification of French print.

This program of research sought an answer to the following question: What is the nature of the mechanism underlying French readers' ability to identify syllabic boundaries in print? Two complementary approaches were taken to shed some light on this problem: first, we examined how the structural properties of syllables influence syllabification decisions; and second, we explored the relationship between syllabic structure and the issue of syllabic mediation in visual word recognition (VWR). In the first study, university students were asked to syllabify a list of 248 words (Experiment 1) or pseudowords (Experiment 2), in a paper-and-pencil syllabification task. The data were coded and then analyzed according to a framework representing the realm of all possible environments in which syllabic boundaries can be identified, within any given letter string. In the second study, participants were asked to verify the proper location for a syllabic boundary marker, which was inserted between the letters of isolated words displayed at the center of a computer screen (e.g., 'ca/bane' [shack]). In the syllable boundary verification (SBV) task, trisyllabic stimuli that contained a single medial consonant or medial consonant pair were contrasted either at the first or second syllabic boundary (i.e., Experiments 1 and 3: CV.C&barbelow;V.CV vs. CV C.CV.CV; Experiment 2: CV.CV.C&barbelow;V vs. CV.CV C.CV). The results showed that lexicality was not a factor in the untimed syllabification task (Study 1), where participants relied on simple heuristics to parse letter strings (i.e., spelling-to-sound translation, prescribed rule for separating geminate consonants). In the timed verification task (Study 2), a location-specific effect of syllabic structure was observed in the critical marker position for all three experiments, in addition to a word-frequency effect. Moreover, a reliable effect of marker serial position revealed an increase in response times towards the end of words. The pattern of results for this series of experiments is most consistent with the idea of a lexically-derived syllabic structure effect and inconsistent with one form of the syllabic mediation hypothesis (i.e., syllable-as-access-code hypothesis). Overall, the findings of both studies converge towards the following conclusion: The mechanism underlying the ability to identify syllabic boundaries in French print relies on multiple sources of constraint that vary according to task demands