Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:41:58.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Writing dictated words and picture names: Syllabic boundaries affect execution in Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

CARLOS J. ÁLVAREZ ,
DAVID COTTRELL  and
OLIVIA AFONSO
CARLOS J. ÁLVAREZ*
Affiliation:
Universidad de la Laguna
DAVID COTTRELL
Affiliation:
James Cook University
OLIVIA AFONSO
Affiliation:
Universidad de la Laguna
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Carlos J. Álvarez, Departamento Psicología Cognitiva, Social y Organizacional Facultad de Psicología, Campus de Guajara, Universidad de La Laguna, 38205-S/C de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two experiments examined the role of syllables in writing Spanish words. In Experiment 1, participants had to write single words that were aurally presented. The interletter intervals (ILIs) between critical letters were measured. Longer ILIs were found in the intersyllabic than the intrasyllabic condition. In Experiment 2, the inputs were pictures to remove any potential phonological bias stemming from the input stimulus. Results suggested that the linguistic nature of the input is not determining the output. Post hoc analyses revealed that other characteristics of the stimuli cannot explain the results. These results indicate that syllables are essential units of processing in writing Spanish and that central processes related to spelling and the graphemic buffer affect peripheral processes at movement execution.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 205 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alameda, J. R., & Cuetos, F. (1995). Diccionario de frecuencia de las unidades lingüísticas del castellano. Oviedo, Spain: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.Google Scholar
Álvarez, C. J., Carreiras, M., & Perea, M. (2004). Are syllables phonological units in visual word recognition? Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 427–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Álvarez, C. J., Carreiras, M., & Taft, M. (2001). Syllables and morphemes: Contrasting frequency effects in Spanish. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27, 545–555.Google ScholarPubMed
Bogaerts, H., Meulenbroek, R. G. J., & Thomassen, A. J. W. M. (1996). The possible role of the syllable as a processing unit in handwriting. In Simner, M. L., Leedham, C. G., & Thomassen, A. J. W. M. (Eds.), Handwriting and drawing research: Basic and applied issues (pp. 115–126). Amsterdam: IOS Press.Google Scholar
Bradley, D. C., Sánchez-Casas, R. M., & García-Albea, J. E. (1993). The status of the syllable in the perception of Spanish and English. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 197–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchwald, A., & Rapp, B. (2003). The orthographic representation of consonant–vowel status: Evidence from two cases of acquired dysgraphia. Brain and Language, 87, 120–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchwald, A., & Rapp, B. (2006). Consonants and vowels in orthography. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23, 308–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramazza, A. (1988). Some aspects of language processing revealed through the analysis of acquired dysgraphia: The lexical system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 11, 395–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramazza, A., & Miceli, G. (1990). The structure of graphemic representations. Cognition, 37, 243–297.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caramazza, A., Miceli, G., Villa, G., & Romani, C. (1987). The role of the graphemic buffer in spelling: Evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia. Cognition, 26, 59–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carreiras, M., Alvarez, C. J., & de Vega, M. (1993). Syllable frequency and visual word recognition in Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 766–780.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carreiras, M., & Perea, M. (2004). Naming pseudowords in Spanish: Effects of syllable frequency. Brain and Language, 90, 393–400.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cottrell, D. (1999). SpellWrite Version 1.6 [Computer software and manual]. Retrieved from Google Scholar
Damian, M. (2003). Articulatory duration in single-word speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 29, 416–433.Google ScholarPubMed
Delattre, M., Bonin, P., & Barry, C. (2006). Written spelling to dictation: Sound-to-spelling regularity affects both writing latencies and durations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 1330–1340.Google ScholarPubMed
Dell, G. (1986). A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 96, 283–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dell, G. (1988). The retrieval of phonological forms in production: Tests of predictions from a connectionist model. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 124–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, A. W. (1982). Spelling and writing (and reading and speaking). In Ellis, A. W. (Ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, A. W. (1988). Normal writing processes and peripheral acquired dysgraphias. Language and Cognitive Processes, 3, 99–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jóndóttir, M. K., Shallice, T., & Wise, R. (1996). Phonological mediation and the graphemic buffer disorder in spelling: Cross-language differences? Cognition, 59, 169–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kandel, S., Álvarez, C. J., & Vallée, N. (2006). Syllables as processing units in handwriting production. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 18–31.Google ScholarPubMed
Kandel, S., & Valdois, S. (2006). Syllables as functional units in a copying task: A visuo-othographic and graphomotor approach. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21, 432–452CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kello, C. T., Plaut, D. C., & MacWhinney, B. (2000). The task dependence of staged vs. cascaded processing: An empirical and computational study of Stroop interference in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 129, 340–361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellogg, R. T. (1994). The psychology of writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kellogg, R. T., Olive, T., & Piolat, A. (2007). Verbal, visual, and spatial working memory in written language production. Acta Psychologica, 124, 382–397.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Boston: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mathey, S., & Zagar, D. (2002). Lexical similarity in visual word recognition: The effect of syllabic neighborhood in French. Current Psychology Letters: Behavior, Brain, and Cognition, 8, 107–121.Google Scholar
McCloskey, M., Badecker, W., Goodman-Schulman, R. A., & Aliminosa, D. (1994). The structure of graphemic representations in spelling: Evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 11, 341–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehler, J., Dommergues, J. Y., Frauenfelder, U., & Seguí, J. (1981). The syllable's role in speech segmentation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 298–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (1997). The psycholinguistics of spelling and reading. In Perfetti, C. A. & Rieben, L. (Eds.), Learning to spell: Research, theory, and practice across languages. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sage, K., & Ellis, A. (2004). Lexical influences in graphemic buffer disorder. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 381–400.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanfeliu, M. C., & Fernández, A. (1996). A set of 254 Snodgrass–Vanderwart pictures standardized for Spanish: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Behavior Research, Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 28, 537–555.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Dupoux, E., Seguí, J., & Mehler, J. (1992). Contrasting syllabic effects in Catalan and Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 18–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shallice, T. (1981). Phonological agraphia and the lexical route in writing. Brain, 104, 412–429.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shallice, T., Rumiati, R. I., & Zadini, A. (2000). The selective impairment of the phonological output buffer. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 517–546.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snodgrass, J. G., & Vanderwart, M. (1980). A standardized set of 260 pictures: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 6, 174–215.Google ScholarPubMed
Tainturier, M. J., & Caramazza, A. (1996). The status of double letters in graphemic representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 53–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tainturier, M. J., & Rapp, B. (2001). The spelling process. In Rapp, B. (Ed.), What deficits reveal about the human mind/brain: A handbook of cognitive neuropsychology. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
van Galen, G. P. (1991). Handwriting: Issues for a psychomotor theory. Human Movement Science, 10, 165–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weingarten, R., Nottbusch, G., & Will, U. (2004). Morphemes, syllables, and graphemes in written word production. In Pechmann, T. & Habel, C. (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to speech production (pp. 529–572). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wheeldon, L. R., & Lahiri, A. (2002). The minimal unit of phonological encoding: Prosodic or lexical word. Cognition, 85, 31–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wing, A. M., & Baddeley, A. D. (1980). Spelling errors in handwriting: A corpus and a distributional analysis. In Frith, U. (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Zesiger, P., Orliaguet, J. P., Boë, L. J., & Mounoud, P. (1994). The influence of syllabic structure in handwriting and typing production. In Faure, C., Lorette, G., & Vinter, A. (Eds.), Advances in handwriting and drawing: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 389–401). Paris: Europia.Google Scholar