The Omission of Accent Marks Does Not Hinder Word Recognition: Evidence From Spanish

Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Recent research has found that the omission of accent marks in Spanish does not produce slower word identification times in go/no-go lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks [e.g., cárcel = carcel], thus suggesting that vowels like á and a are represented by the same orthographic units during word recognition and reading. However, there is a discrepant finding with the yes/no lexical decision task, where the words with the omitted accent mark produced longer response times than the words with the accent mark. In Experiment 1, we examined this discrepant finding by running a yes/no lexical decision experiment comparing the effects for words and non-words. Results showed slower response times for the words with omitted accent mark than for those with the accent mark present, thus suggesting a bias toward a “word” response for accented items in the yes/no lexical decision task. To test this interpretation, Experiment 2 used the same stimuli with a blocked design and a go/no-go lexical decision task. Results showed similar response times to words regardless of whether the accent mark was omitted. This pattern strongly suggests that the longer response times to words with an omitted accent mark in yes/no lexical decision experiments are a task-dependent effect rather than a genuine reading cost.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-12-14

Downloads
6 (#1,269,502)

6 months
4 (#319,344)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Maria Fernandez
University of Melbourne

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations