Replicating syllable frequency effects in Spanish in German: One more challenge to computational models of visual word recognition

Two experiments tested the role of syllable frequency in word recognition, recently suggested in Spanish, in another shallow orthography, German. Like in Spanish, word recognition performance was inhibited in a lexical decision and a perceptual identification task when the first syllable of a word was of high frequency. Given this replication of the inhibitory effect of syllable frequency in a second language, we discuss the issue whether and how computational models of word recognition would have to represent a word’s syllabic structure in order to accurately describe processing of polysyllabic words.