Two distinct parsing stages in nonword reading aloud: Evidence from Russian

ABSTRACT

Word reading partly depends on the activation of sublexical letter clusters. Previous research has studied which types of letter clusters have psychological saliency, but less is known about cognitive mechanisms of letter string parsing. Here, we take advantage of the high degree of context-dependency of the Russian orthography to examine whether consonant–vowel (CV) clusters are treated as units in two stages of sublexical processing. In two experiments using a nonword reading task, we use two orthogonal manipulations: (a) insertion of a visual disruptor (#) to assess whether CV clusters are kept intact during the early visual parsing stage, and (b) presence of context-dependent grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs; e.g., л[а] → /l/; л[я] → /l^j/), to assess whether CV clusters remain intact or are split during the print-to-speech conversion stage. The results suggest that although CV clusters are initially processed as perceptual units in the early visual parsing stage, letters and not CV clusters drive print-to-speech conversion.

KEYWORDS:

• Letters
• Nonwords
• Reading
• Sublexical processing
• Whammies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We thank Anastasia Ulicheva for providing the bigram frequency and consonant frequency counts. Note that calculating the frequency of vowel phonemes for nonwords is unfeasible, because the pronunciation of a vowel depends on where the participant places stress; unstressed vowels are reduced in Russian. As stress assignment varies across participants, there is no single correct pronunciation for each vowel.