"AU" /o/ and "AN" /a/ in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence "AU" is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, "AN" can be associated with either one…

In two experiments, French speakers detected CV or CVC sequences at the beginning of dysyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. In both experiments. latencies were shorter to CV than to CVC targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for CVC-CV than for CV-CV carriers. (Author/VWL)

Compared responses of English-French bilinguals performing semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks using translation-priming stimuli. Using the same stimuli, priming effects were significantly stronger in semantic categorization than in lexical decision, suggesting the translation-priming effect in the former is mediated by semantic…

The recognition of multimorphemic French words was investigated using a procedure that allowed the position of first fixation of the eye to be manipulated and gaze durations to be recorded. (37 references) (Author/LB)

Two experiments with French university students investigated whether the visual recognition of short prefixed and suffixed words was affected by their morphological structure. Results indicated that encoding times were sensitive to the lexical status of the unit, with a significant benefit occurring only when the subword unit corresponded to the…

Four visual lexical decision experiments using the masked priming paradigm tested for effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency with primes varying in degree of morphological and orthographic overlap with free root targets in French. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the production of homophone confusions in writing. The article overviews five experiments demonstrating that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. Findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model. (45 references) (Author/CK)