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ABSTRACT
Recent research has shown that the omission of diacritics in words does not affect the initial contact with the lexical entries, as measured by masked priming. In the present study, we directly examined whether diacritics’ omission slows down lexical access using a single-presentation semantic categorisation task (“is the word an animal name?”). We did so in a language in which diacritics reflect lexical stress but not vowel quality (Spanish; e.g. ratón [mouse] vs. raton; Experiment 1) and in a language in which diacritics reflect vowel quality but not lexical stress (German; e.g. Kröte vs. Krote; Experiment 2). In Spanish, word response times were similar for words with diacritics that were either present or omitted. In contrast, German words were responded more slowly when the words’ diacritics were omitted. Thus, the function of diacritics in each language determines how words with diacritics are represented in the mental lexicon.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In a recent study on the role of repeated letters using the lexical decision data of French Lexicon Project, Trifonova and Adelman (Citation2019) used two scenarios depending on whether the diacritics on the vowels were disregarded or not.
2 The initial letter was capitalized in the German experiment because all words were nouns.
3 We could only select 40 familiar animal words in Spanish containing diacritics. Thus, the ratio of animal/non-animal responses was 2:1 (see Labusch et al., Citation2021; Perea et al., Citation2020a, for a similar ratio).
4 We could only find 36 familiar diacritical words in German that corresponded to animal names. As in Experiment 1, the ratio of animal/non-animal responses was 2:1.