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Jalapeno or jalapeño: Do diacritics in consonant letters modulate visual similarity effects during word recognition?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2020

Ana Marcet ,
Hnazand Ghukasyan ,
María Fernández-López  and
Manuel Perea Open the ORCID record for Manuel Perea [Opens in a new window]
Ana Marcet
Affiliation:
Universitat de València
Hnazand Ghukasyan
Affiliation:
Universitat de València
María Fernández-López
Affiliation:
Universitat de València
Manuel Perea*
Affiliation:
Universitat de València and Universidad Nebrija
*
*Address for Correspondence: Manuel Perea, Departamento de Metodología, Av. Blasco Ibáñez, 21 46010-Valencia, Spain. Email: mperea@uv.es
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Abstract

Prior research has shown that word identification times to DENTIST are faster when briefly preceded by a visually similar prime (dentjst; i↔j) than when preceded by a visually dissimilar prime (dentgst). However, these effects of visual similarity do not occur in the Arabic alphabet when the critical letter differs in the diacritical signs: for the target the visually similar one-letter replaced prime (compare and is no more effective than the visually dissimilar one-letter replaced prime Here we examined whether this dissociative pattern is due to the special role of diacritics during word processing. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment in Spanish using target words containing one of two consonants that only differed in the presence/absence of a diacritical sign: n and ñ. The prime-target conditions were identity, visually similar, and visually dissimilar. Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition for muñeca-type words (muneca-MUÑECA < museca-MUÑECA), but not for moneda-type words (moñeda-MONEDA = moseda-MONEDA). Thus, diacritical signs are salient elements that play a special role during the first moments of processing, thus constraining the interplay between the “feature” and “letter” levels in models of visual word recognition.

Keywords

diacritical signslexical decisionmasked primingvisual similarity
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , May 2020 , pp. 579 - 593
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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