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ABSTRACT
Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish because, unlike French, accented and non-accented vowels only convey stress information. We conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment and a masked priming lexical decision experiment, each with three priming conditions (identity, visually similar, visually dissimilar). Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition. Furthermore, for non-accented primes, the visually similar condition was as effective as the identity condition. Thus, these findings suggest that: 1) accented and non-accented vowels share their abstract letter representations in Spanish; and 2) the nature of orthographic representations is molded by the characteristics of each language.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Notes
1. As accented vowels and their non-accented counterparts share the base letter, they have a high degree of visual similarity (e.g., 6.30 out of 7 for the pair e-é in the Simpson, Mousikou, Montoya, & Defior, Citation2012, norms).
2. We acknowledge that the effects of letter complexity in letter recognition are only beginning to be understood (e.g., more complex letters also tend to be more distinctive; see Wiley & Rapp, Citation2018, for discussion).
3. For instance, the word sabana, which ends in a vowel, is pronounced/sa.’ba.na/, whereas the word sabanal, which ends in a consonant different from n or s, is pronounced/sa.ba.’nal/. Indeed, in the last edition of the norms of the Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española, Citation2010), the chapter on when to use accent marks occupies nearly 90 pages.