Efectos de la estructura silábica en el priming silábico

The syllable can be considered as an access unit in the recognition of visually presented words. Most of the evidence comes from experiments that have manipulated syllable frequency (Carreiras, Alvarez, & de Vega, 1993) and from syllable priming experiments (i.e., faster identification times for junos-JUNIO than for juntu-JUNIO; Carreiras & Perea, 2002). In the present study we examined whether the magnitude of syllable priming is modulated by the syllabic structure of a word's initial syllable. We conducted three priming experiments, with stimulus-onset asynchronies ranging from 64 to 320 ms, using three lexical decision tasks. The results showed a syllable priming effect for words with a CV syllabic structure in the initial syllable, but not for words with a CVC syllable structure in the initial syllable. This finding has important implications for models of visual word recognition that employ the syllable as a mediating unit between the letter and the word levels.