The role of nasals in reading: a normative study in French.
Dual-route models of reading assume that reading can be done in two ways. A most common lexical route, on the one hand, allows regular and irregular words to be read while a second sublexical route allows nonwords and novel words to be read. A graphemic processing stage in sublexical reading is assumed to assemble the individual letters of a word or a nonword into multiletter graphemes prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. The purpose of this study was to determine whether vowel/nasal clusters required as much time to be processed asvowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters in sublexical nonword reading in French. Results indicate that nonwords that contain vowel/nasal clusters are read significantly faster than nonwords comprising vowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters. Furthermore, nonwords that contain single-letter graphemes are read significantly faster than nonwords comprising vowel/nasal clusters and nonwords comprising vowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters. These results taken as a whole support the idea that nasals act as diacritic marks rather than being processed by means of a graphemic parsing procedure.
Joubert
S
S
Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire deGériatrie de Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Lecours
A R
AR
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading