title: Tracking the emergence of the consonant bias in visual-word recognition: evidence with developing readers.
abstract: Recent research with skilled adult readers has consistently revealed an advantage of consonants over vowels in visual-word recognition (i.e., the so-called "consonant bias"). Nevertheless, little is known about how early in development the consonant bias emerges. This work aims to address this issue by studying the relative contribution of consonants and vowels at the early stages of visual-word recognition in developing readers (2(nd) and 4(th) Grade children) and skilled adult readers (college students) using a masked priming lexical decision task. Target words starting either with a consonant or a vowel were preceded by a briefly presented masked prime (50 ms) that could be the same as the target (e.g., pirata-PIRATA [pirate-PIRATE]), a consonant-preserving prime (e.g., pureto-PIRATA), a vowel-preserving prime (e.g., gicala-PIRATA), or an unrelated prime (e.g., bocelo -PIRATA). Results revealed significant priming effects for the identity and consonant-preserving conditions in adult readers and 4(th) Grade children, whereas 2(nd) graders only showed priming for the identity condition. In adult readers, the advantage of consonants was observed both for words starting with a consonant or a vowel, while in 4(th) graders this advantage was restricted to words with an initial consonant. Thus, the present findings suggest that a Consonant/Vowel skeleton should be included in future (developmental) models of visual-word recognition and reading.
authors: Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal.
authors: Ana Paula
authors: AP
authors: Soares
authors: ERI-Lectura and Departamento de Metodología, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain ; Basque Center on Brain, Language, and Cognition, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
authors: Manuel
authors: M
authors: Perea
authors: Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal ; Cognitive Processes and Behaviour Research Group, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
authors: Montserrat
authors: M
authors: Comesaña
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult