Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085

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Journal of Memory and Language

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jml

Are graphemic effects real in skilled visual word recognition? T

Fabienne Chetail
Laboratoire Cognition Langage, & Développement (LCLD), Centre de Recherche Cognition et Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Av. F. Roosevelt,
50/CP 191, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: In the last decades, repeated evidence for graphemic effects has been reported in skilled readers. For example, a
Visual word recognition letter is more easily detected in a word when it corresponds to a simple grapheme (e.g., A in PLACE) than when it
Graphemes is embedded in a complex one (e.g., A in BEACH). Such effects have been taken as a demonstration that gra-
Graphemic effect phemes are processed as perceptual units by the reading system. However, this conclusion has been recently
challenged by studies using different experimental designs. In the present study, we used four experimental
situations to get a clearer picture of the reliability of graphemic effects. We used four types of tasks: letter
detection (Experiment 1), length estimation (Experiment 2), mixing case lexical decision (Experiment 3), and
primed lexical decision (Experiments 4 and 5). In each task, the processing of words with complex graphemes
(e.g., BEACH) was compared to the processing of words with simple graphemes (e.g., PLACE). Overall, we found
no reliable grapheme effect, supporting the claim that graphemes are not perceptual units in skilled visual word
recognition. An alternative interpretation of ‘grapheme effects’ previously reported with the letter detection task
is discussed.

Some cognitive functions are so central for an efficient behaviour in
the everyday life that they have been under close scrutiny since the
birth of cognitive psychology. Language is indisputably one of them
(see Smith, 2001). Concurrently to the investigation of language pro-
cesses, the mechanisms of written language processing (visual word
recognition, reading) have been intensively studied. A central question
in this field has been to understand how readers are able to access the
phonological form associated with written words. In other words, how
are we able to produce speech from printed symbols? Two main points
of view have been pitched against each other during decades, them-
selves rooted on two different perspectives of access to meaning from
print (Henderson, 1982). According to the lexical access hypothesis,
visual information directly activates an entry in a mental lexicon, which
gives access to the meaning of words as well as to their pronunciation
(e.g., Green & Shallice, 1976). This supposes that the orthographic form
of all known words is stored in memory. On the contrary, according to
the hypothesis of phonological access, visual information is converted
into speech from a set of print-to-sound correspondence rules (in al-
phabetic writing systems). This speech code activates the relevant entry
in the mental lexicon, which gives access to meaning, and it is used to
generate the pronunciation of the visual input (e.g., Gough, 1972).
Eventually, it has been put forward that the two proposals could co-
exist since there are not mutually exclusive. This has been formalized in
dual-route theories (e.g., Coltheart, 1978; Forster & Chambers, 1973;
Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1974). In the dual route cascaded
model for example (e.g., Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler,
2001), each hypothesis (lexical access and phonological access) corre-
sponds to one route of reading aloud. Several debates emerged in re-
action to dual-route theories, such as the validity of dual-route models
per se (e.g., Glushko, 1979; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) or the
nature of the units used for print-to-sound decoding in reading aloud
(e.g., Coltheart, 1978). The present study deals with the question of the
nature of reading units, but in skilled visual word recognition. More
precisely, we tested whether grapheme units have a special status in
written word processing in adult French speakers.
The grapheme issue has been mostly debated in dual-route-based
models (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Diependaele, Ziegler, & Grainger,
2010; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007a,b, 2010), which usually include
two pathways. One pathway enables sublexical orthographic informa-
tion to make direct contact with whole-word orthographic representa-
tions (direct route), while on the other pathway, sublexical ortho-
graphic information is first translated into a sublexical phonological
code, which then provides access to whole-word phonological re-
presentations and semantics (indirect route). These models attribute a
key role to graphemes on the indirect route for reading aloud, although
the exact nature of this role varies. In CDP+ models for example (Perry
et al., 2007a,b, 2010), mapping between letters and phonemes is
mediated by a grapheme processing stage whereby a letter string is first

E-mail address: fchetail@ulb.ac.be.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104085
Received 28 February 2019; Received in revised form 10 December 2019; Accepted 11 December 2019
Available online 17 December 2019
0749-596X/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
F. Chetail
parsed and segmented into grapheme units. In DRC models, letter
strings are analysed serially from left to right and the system looks for a
rule (in a list of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules) which
letters match the leftmost letters of the string (see Coltheart et al., 2001;
Rastle & Coltheart, 1998). Hence, although it has been defended that
decoding for reading aloud could rest upon other units than graphemes
(e.g., Doignon-Camus & Zagar, 2014), the hypothesis that graphemes
are the units used for decoding is still central, both to explain the be-
ginning of reading acquisition and to account for pseudoword reading
in adults.
At the same time, the issue of reading units has been discussed in
skilled visual word recognition. Initially, it was proposed that in adults,
access to the mental lexicon operates by the activation of letter re-
presentations which activate in turn orthographic word representations
(see McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). Gradually, however, it has been
proposed that this hierarchy of detectors could be more complex and
include intermediary sublexical representations (e.g., Grainger & Van
Heuven, 2003; Taft, 1991; Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, & Seigneuric,
2006). Therefore, a recurrent question in the field has been to de-
termine what perceptual units are involved in the early steps of written
word identification. ‘Perceptual unit’ or ‘reading unit’ is taken here as
any element of information for which a detector exists in the hierarchy
of units leading to the activation of orthographic word forms (Chetail,
Drabs, & Content, 2014; Lupker, Acha, Davis, & Perea, 2012).
Many perceptual orthographic units have been proposed since the
1970′s, either constrained by linguistic properties (e.g., graphemes,
orthographic syllables, rimes) or ensuing from orthographic properties
(e.g., bigrams, vowel-centered units) (see Chetail & Content, 2012 for a
review). In this debate, graphemes have occupied a prominent space.
Indeed, given the role of graphemic units in decoding, it has been
proposed that graphemes could also be used by skilled readers during
visual word identification. This proposal has been empirically sup-
ported by several lines of evidence.
First, Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, and Ziegler (1998) compared
response latencies in a perceptual identification task for five letter
words with three, four or five phonemes. They found that reaction times
were longer in three phoneme words than in five phoneme words,
especially if they were of low frequency (see also Rey & Schiller, 2005).
They explained the delayed reaction times in three phoneme words by
the additional time needed to group letters into multi-letter graphemes.
The delay would be less present in high-frequency words because their
identification would be performed rapidly via whole word processing.
In the letter detection task, Rey, Ziegler, and Jacobs (2000) found that a
letter such as A was detected more slowly in words when it was em-
bedded in a multi-letter grapheme (e.g., BEACH) than when it corre-
sponded to a single-letter grapheme (e.g., PLACE) (see also
Commissaire & Casalis, 2018; Marinus & de Jong, 2011). According to
the authors, this suggests that ‘graphemes are automatically processed
by the reading system as perceptual units’ (p. B7). Furthermore, in the
lexical decision task with case mixing, Havelka and Frankish (2010)
reported that reaction times were longer when complex graphemes
were disrupted by case mixing (e.g., sTeAk) than when only the overall
shape of words was disrupted (e.g., stEAk) (see also Pring, 1981). They
took this result as an evidence of the importance of graphemes as visual
units activated in the early stages of written word recognition.
On the contrary, more recent studies failed to report positive evi-
dence for graphemes as perceptual units. First, Lupker et al. (2012) used
the masked primed lexical decision task to test whether grapheme units
are central to visual word recognition. In one condition, target words
(e.g., AMOUNT) were preceded by primes in which one multi-letter
grapheme were replaced by xs (e.g., amxxnt). In that case, four gra-
phemes were still shared between the prime and the target (a, m, n, and
t). In the other condition, half of the multi-letter grapheme and a simple
grapheme were replaced by xs (e.g., axxunt). In that case, only three
graphemes were still shared (a, n, and t) and one simple grapheme of
the prime was not present in the target (u). The authors assumed that, if
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Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
graphemes are central to visual word recognition, the latter prime
should be less efficient (compared to a control prime) than the former
one, and thus should lead to longer reaction times. However, no sig-
nificant difference was found between the two priming conditions. Null
effects were also found with other priming conditions (e.g., letter
transposition) breaking or not multi-letter graphemes. The conclusion is
not that graphemes have no psychological reality (“the claim that the
reading system represent multi-letter graphemes is uncontroversial”, p.
2). Rather, the authors concluded that their experiment provided no
reliable evidence for a central role of graphemes in skilled visual word
recognition, although null effects should be considered cautiously given
the difficulty to interpret them. In other words, it seems that graphemes
should not be considered as perceptual units driving word recognition
via the lexical route. Accordingly, in the length estimation task, Chetail
and Content (2014) also reported no evidence for graphemic units in a
post-hoc analysis. When participants had to represent the physical
length of written words, their estimates were influenced by the number
of vowel-cluster units and by the number of syllables, but a regression
analysis showed no effect of the number of graphemes.
The present study
Given this set of results, it seems hard to decide whether or not
graphemes are perceptual units in skilled reading. First, the studies
leading to positive effects on the one hand and to null effects on the
other hand did not use the same tasks. Second, the absence of sig-
nificant effects in some studies cannot be taken as evidence for the
absence of graphemic effects. Third, some designs previously used had
confounded factors, especially at the phonological level (see
Experiment 1). Fifth, despite this unclear picture, the psychological
reality of graphemic units is still considered (e.g., Kandel & Spinelli,
2010). The aim of the present study was thus to test the role of gra-
phemes as perceptual units by addressing these different shortcomings.
We used four tasks typically used to test unit effects in visual word
recognition; two deemed to tap into the earliest stages of written word
processing (letter detection, length estimation) and two deemed to tap
onto lexical access (case mixing lexical decision, primed lexical deci-
sion). Interestingly, two of these tasks led to positive grapheme effects
in previous studies (letter detection, lexical decision task with case
mixing) and two to non-significant effects (primed lexical decision,
length estimation).
Forty-one participants performed the four tasks in a fixed order
chosen to maintain the participants’ motivation (letter detection, case
mixing lexical decision task, length estimation task, primed lexical
decision). To avoid any bias in the analyses and to present the most
convincing results, this study was pre-registered on Open Science
Framework (https://osf.io/6dpbm/). Before any data collection, the
rationale of the study, the design of the experiments, the hypotheses,
the materials, and the planned analyses were declared. Finally, given
the fair probability of obtaining non-significant effects, we planned to
conduct Bayesian analyses in addition to null hypothesis significance
testing (NHST) analyses in case of p values superior to the standard
threshold .05. In doing so, we expected to be in the position of reliably
concluding in favor of the absence of effects, if necessary.
Experiment 1: Letter detection task
In Experiment 1, participants performed a letter detection task. This
task is assumed to tap onto the early stages of visual word recognition
since readers have to identify letters rather than to do lexical or se-
mantic decisions on words. Moreover, this task has been the most used
to test grapheme effects in print and, to our knowledge, all the studies
published reported positive effects of graphemes (e.g., Brand, Giroux,
Puijalon, & Rey, 2007; Commissaire & Casalis, 2018; Marinus & de
Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000). The typical result is that a letter such as A
is better detected in a word including the letter as a simple grapheme
F. Chetail
(e.g., PLACE) than in a word including the letter as part of a complex
multi-letter grapheme (e.g., BEACH). This effect would arise because
complex graphemes such as EA compete with single-letter graphemes E
and A, and thus delay letter detection. However, as argued by Rey et al.
(2000), this grapheme effect can also be interpreted as a phonemic si-
milarity effect. Indeed, most of the time, the pronunciation of a letter
embedded in a complex grapheme is different from the name of that
letter: The name of A (/eɪ/) is included in the phonological form of
PLACE (/pleɪs/) but not in the phonological form of BEACH (/bitʃ/).
Most of the time, this phonological confound was present in previous
studies using the letter detection task (Brand et al., 2007, Exp 3;
Marinus & de Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000), weakening interpretations
in terms of grapheme complexity (see General Discussion). Here, on the
contrary, we tested the grapheme effect with a typical design (i.e., with
the phonological confound), but also with stimuli enabling us to rule
out any alternative explanation in terms of phonemic overlap (i.e.,
condition ‘no phonological confound’). If graphemes are genuinely ac-
tivated during visual word perception, the target letter should be more
slowly detected when embedded in a complex grapheme than in a
simple one, independently of the phonemic overlap between the letter
name and the phonological form of the word. A grapheme effect was
thus expected whether the phonological confound was present or not.
On the contrary, if the grapheme effects previously reported in the
letter detection task was an artifact due to phonological overlap be-
tween the letter name and the phonological word form, the target letter
should be more slowly detected when embedded in a complex gra-
pheme in case of phonological confound but not when there is no
phonological confound.
Method
Participants. Forty-one students participated to the experiment for
course credits. All were native speakers of French with normal or cor-
rected-to-normal vision and without any language disorder. They were
recruited at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).
Materials. Seventeen pairs of words were selected from the Lexique
database (New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004) so that the two
words in each pair had the letter A at the same internal position. In one
word, A corresponded to a simple grapheme (e.g., LAPIN) whereas it
was part of a complex grapheme in the other one (e.g., PAUSE). The
two conditions of words were matched on word frequency, on the
number of letters, phonemes, syllables, morphemes, and on ortho-
graphic neighbourhood (see Appendix A). In the simple grapheme
condition, the phonological form of the carrier word included the name
of the letter to be detected, but not in the complex grapheme condition.
There was thus a phonological confound with the grapheme manip-
ulation (see Table 1). Seventeen additional pairs of words, each one
with the letter E at the same position, were selected. They were mat-
ched with the first 17 pairs on target letter position, word frequency,
and number of letters. In these pairs, one word included a simple gra-
pheme and the other one a complex grapheme (e.g., LEÇON and JEUDI
respectively), but here, the name of the target letter (E) was included in
both target words so that there was no phonological variation co-
varying with the grapheme manipulation1. Items in these pairs were
matched on the same characteristics as the first 17 pairs. Words for
negative responses were devised so that they matched words eliciting
positive responses on number of letters and phonemes, and word fre-
quency. In the negative trials, the same letters (A and E) were used, in
the same proportions as for positive responses.
Procedure. Participants performed a letter detection task. For each
1
In these pairs, target words entailed the phoneme /ə/, /œ/ or /ø/, all three
being acoustically and phonetically very close, and non-ambiguously associated
with the name of the letter E in French (with slight variations depending on
regional accent).
3
Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
Table 1
Conditions and examples of items eliciting a positive response in Experiment 1
(letter detection task).
Phonological overlap
Grapheme Phonological confound No phonological confound
Simple A in LAPIN, /a/ in /lapɛ̃/ E in LEÇON, /ø/ in /ləsõ/
Complex A in PAUSE, /a/ in /poz/ E in JEUDI, /ø/ in /ʃødi/
trial, a letter (e.g., E) was presented in uppercase for 500 ms in the
center of the screen. Then, a fixation cross was displayed for 500 ms,
and immediately followed by the word stimulus in lowercase for a
duration of 50 ms. After a blank of 67 ms, a post-mask (row of hash
marks) was displayed until the participants responded. Participants had
to decide as quickly and as accurately as possible whether the letter
initially presented was included in the word by pressing one of two
buttons on a keyboard. Reactions times were measured from the word
onset. Feedback was provided when they fail to respond (red cross,
during 500 ms). All the participants performed 10 practice trials before
receiving the experimental trials in a different random order.
Results and discussion
In this experiment and in the following ones, the statistical analyses
were run with R packages (R Core Team, 2018) under the RStudio
environment (RStudio Team, , 2016). All the raw data and scripts for
analyses are available at https://osf.io/nxkdq/. The mean correct re-
action times and mean error rates averaged over participants are pre-
sented in Table 2. The data of one participant were not taken into ac-
count because of a computer crash during the testing. We excluded the
trials eliciting very long (> 2,000 ms) or very short (< 300 ms) reac-
tion times (2.48% of the data).
NHST analyses. The data were submitted to separate analyses of
variance (ANOVA) on the participant and item means for positive re-
sponses with grapheme complexity and phonological overlap as factors.
In reaction times, the interaction between the two factors was sig-
nificant in the participant analyses, F1(1, 39) = 4.42, p = 0.04, F2(1,
64) = 2.27, p = 0.14. Simple effects showed that the effect of gra-
pheme complexity was significant only in the participant analysis in the
condition ‘phonological confound’, F1(1, 39) = 5.94, p = 0.02, F2(1,
64) = 1.72, p = 0.19, and not significant in the condition ‘no phono-
logical confound’, F1(1, 39) = 1.36, p = 0.25, F2 < 1. In error rates,
neither the interaction (Fs < 1) nor the simple effects (phonological
confound: F1 < 1, F2(1, 64) = 2.27, p = 0.14; no phonological
confound: Fs < 1) were significant.2
Bayesian analyses. Given that we had several p values above the
threshold 0.05, we decided to quantify the evidence in favor of the
absence of effects. To do so, we conducted Bayesian ANOVAs with the R
package BayesFactor (Morey et al., 2018). To test the interaction effect,
a model with the two main effects was compared to a model with the
two main effects plus the interaction. For the two simple effects, models
with the factor ‘grapheme’ were compared to a null model. In both
cases, BF10 corresponds to the ratio of the likelihood of the complete
model to the likelihood of the null model. BF10 > 1 thus corresponded
to evidence in favor a the model with an interaction or a grapheme
effect, whereas BF10 < 0 corresponded to evidence in favor of the
absence of effects. To quantify the evidence, we relied on the decision
criterion scheme proposed by Jeffreys (1961, in Wagenmakers, Wetzels,
Borsboom, & van der Maas, 2011). As presented in Table 3, all BF10
were inferior to 1 both in reaction times and in error rates. The only
exception was BF10 in the participant analyses for the first simple effect
(reaction times).
2
As declared in the pre-registration form, we were interested in the inter-
action and in the two simple effects, so we report only those effects here.
F. Chetail Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085

Table 2
Mean correct reaction times and error rates in Experiment 1 (letter detection task) according to grapheme complexity and phonological confound (standard de-
viations are presented in brackets).
Phonological confound No phonological confound

Reaction times (in ms) Simple grapheme 718 (81) 830 (90)
Complex grapheme 745 (71) 814 (96)
Error rates (in %) Simple grapheme 8.1 (17.8) 11.6 (13.0)
Complex grapheme 8.1 (17.6) 12.2 (15.0)

Table 3
Summary of statistical results in Experiment 1 (letter detection task).
DV Effect NHST analyses Bayesian analyses (N = 40) Bayesian analyses (N = 74)

P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses

RTs Interaction p = 0.04 p = 0.14 BF10 = 0.81 BF10 = 0.84 BF10 = 2.35 BF10 = 0.88
Simple effect in the condition ‘phonological confound’ p = 0.02 p = 0.19 BF10 = 2.50 BF10 = 0.48 BF10 = 434 BF10 = 0.77
Simple effect in the condition ‘no phonological confound’ p = 0.25 p = 0.42 BF10 = 0.41 BF10 = 0.30 BF10 = 0.28 BF10 = 0.34
Error rates Interaction p = 0.76 p = 0.85 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.35 BF10 = 0.19 BF10 = 0.37
Simple effect in the condition ‘phonological confound’ p = 0.98 p = 0.98 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.39 BF10 = 0.37 BF10 = 0.36
Simple effect in the condition ‘no phonological confound’ p = 0.69 p = 0.81 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.39 BF10 = 0.18 BF10 = 0.32

Notes. DV = dependant variable, RTs = reaction times, P = participant, I = item.

Albeit positive, the evidence for the grapheme effect in the condi-
tion ‘phonological confound’ is anecdotal and only present in the par-
ticipant analysis. We therefore tested more participants, as declared in
the pre-registration form to test whether we could gain more evidence
in favor of the effect. Thirty-four new participants were enrolled and
added to the 40 original ones. At a descriptive level, the difference
between the two grapheme conditions increased in case of phonological
confound (from 27 ms with 40 participants to 34 ms with 74 partici-
pants) but not in the ‘no phonological confound’ condition (from
−16 ms to −11 ms).3 The Bayesian ANOVA conducted on the data of
the 74 participants led to extreme evidence for an effect of graphemic
structure in the ‘phonological confound’ condition (albeit still only in
participants, see Table 3). However, there was still no evidence for a
grapheme effect in the ‘no phonological confound condition.
To sum up, we found some evidence for a grapheme effect in the
condition ‘phonological confound’. The letter A was more rapidly de-
tected in a word when it corresponded to a single grapheme than when
it was part of a complex grapheme. This result is in line with the effects
reported in previous studies (e.g., Brand et al., 2007; Commissaire &
Casalis, 2018; Marinus & de Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000), typically
taken as an evidence that skilled readers automatically process the
graphemic structure of words. However, there is also a substantial
evidence for H0 in the condition ‘no phonological confound’. In this
condition, A was not more rapidly detected in a word when it corre-
sponded to a single grapheme than when it was part of a complex
grapheme. The difference between the conditions ‘confound’ and ‘no
confound’ is that, in the former condition only, the graphemic manip-
ulation was confounded with a phonemic overlap between the letter
and the phonological word forms. Therefore, the absence of effect in the
condition ‘no phonological confound’ suggests that the grapheme effect
obtained in the condition ‘phonological confound’ is not due to the
graphemic structure of words per se but to the phonemic overlap that
co-varies with the graphemic structure of words. We can thus conclude
that, in this first experiment, we found no evidence for a genuine gra-
pheme effect in visual word processing4.
Experiment 2: Length estimation task
Here, we used another task, developed by Chetail and Content
(2014), to test whether the graphemic structure of words impacts the
early stages of written word processing. In the length estimation task,
letter strings are briefly displayed on the screen and participants have
to reproduce the physical length of the items by drawing a line on the
screen with the computer mouse. This task provides an indirect mea-
sure of structural effects without directing participants’ attention to-
ward word structure or constituents. Furthermore, because the task
does not require word identification or access to phonology, it may
isolate phenomena related to the earliest stages of orthographic pro-
cessing. In previous studies, Chetail and Content (2017, 2014) showed
that despite strict matching of words in objective length on the screen,
participants produced shorter lines to represent the length of words
with fewer orthographic units such as vowel clusters (see Chetail &
Content, 2012) compared to controls words. It was assumed that this
perceptual bias stems from the smaller number of orthographic units in
the former words.
Based on these results, the rationale of Experiment 2 was that if
readers are sensitive to the graphemic structure of words in the early
steps of word recognition, then the number of graphemes should in-
fluence their length estimates. Despite an identical objective length
(same length on the screen, same number of letters, of vowel clusters, of
syllables), words with fewer graphemes should be estimated shorter
than words with more graphemes.
Participants. The participants were the same as in Experiment 1.
Materials. Thirty pairs of six or seven letter words were selected
from the Lexique database (New et al., 2004) so that one word had at
least three more phonemes than the other one (condition long, e.g.,
sortir - /sɔʀtiʀ/ vs. condition short, e.g., enfant - /ãfã/, respectively).
Hence, depending on how silent letters are considered, the two words in
the pairs differed in number of graphemes by at least two. In each pair,
the two items had the same number of letters, syllables and vowel

3
In the ‘phonological confound’ condition, the mean reaction times for the
simple and complex conditions were respectively 737 ms (SD = 81) and 771 ms
(SD = 88). In the ‘no phonological condition’, the means were respectively 827
ms (SD = 96) and 816 ms (SD = 87).
4
A second experiment with a letter detection task was planned in the pre-
registration form (Experiment 1b) as a conceptual replication of Experiment 1.
(footnote continued)
For the sake of concision, we did not add the details of the experiment here
since first, we found no evidence at all for grapheme effects in Experiment 1b
(the phonological confound being present or no) and second, the complex
graphemes used had a low cohesion, limiting interpretations (see General dis-
cussion). However, all the files necessary to understand the design and access
the results are available at https://osf.io/nxkdq/.

4
F. Chetail
clusters, and overall, the two conditions were matched on word fre-
quency, number of morphemes and orthographic neighbourhood (see
Appendix A). No word had a letter doublet. As fillers, we included the
80 experimental trisyllabic words and 46 fillers (words of 3 or 9 letters)
from Chetail and Content (2014).
Procedure. Participants performed a length estimation task. On
each trial, a fixation cross appeared for 500 ms, immediately followed
by a 33 ms mask (string of #). The stimulus was then presented during
100 ms followed again by the mask during 33 ms. Words were dis-
played in lowercase using the Courier New fixed-width font. After the
mask, the mouse cursor appeared on the screen and participants had to
draw a line representing the physical length of the stimulus. They used
the mouse to lengthen or shorten the line and clicked to validate their
estimation. Length estimates were recorded in pixels. All participants
performed eight practice trials before receiving the experimental trials
in a different random order. In the practice trials only, feedback in-
dicated how much (in percentage) the estimate differed from the real
length.
Results and discussion
Extreme values deviating from the real length by 90% or more were
discarded from the analyses (0.07%). Overall, the estimated length was
close to the real length (131 vs. 122 pixels respectively). The estimated
length for short and long words (i.e., words with fewer graphemes and
words with more graphemes, respectively) was 132 and 130 pixels re-
spectively.
NHST analyses. Following Chetail and Content (2014) analyses, we
fitted a linear mixed-effect regression model using the lme4 package in
the R software (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) on the estimates for
the experimental items. The model included word condition (short,
long) as a fixed factor, and random intercepts for both participants and
items. As words varied overall in number of letters, syllables and vowel
clusters, these three variables were added as covariates. In addition,
given that most of the time readers are exposed to words written in
proportional fonts and might thus rely on a memory representation
incorporating letter size variations (e.g., the fact that ‘w’ takes more
space than ‘i’), we also included a proportionality correction as a cov-
ariate (see Chetail & Content, 2014). The covariates were centered.
There was no significant difference between the estimated length of
short and long words, b = −0.04, t = −0.04. On the contrary, letter
length, b = 14.92, t = 13.32, p < 0.001, proportionality correction,
b = 0.19, t = 2.93, p = 0.005, and number of vowel clusters, b = 6.70,
t = 5.00, p < 0.001, significantly contributed to the final model.
Bayesian analyses. We used a Bayesian version of the linear mixed-
effect regression model analyses (lmBF() function in the BayesFactor
package). We tested whether the alternative model (including the word
condition –short, long words–, and the four covariates) had a higher
likelihood than the null model (i.e., without word condition). The re-
sults showed a strong evidence for the latter model, BF10 = 0.06.
Hence, the data showed no effect of graphemic length. Short words
(e.g., with 2 graphemes) were not estimated shorter than long words
(e.g., with 5 graphemes). Participants’ estimates were thus not im-
pacted by the number of graphemes whereas previous studies found
that they were influenced by other orthographic or phonological sub-
lexical units (see Chetail & Content, 2014, 2017).5
5 ‘complex grapheme’, F1(1, 40) = 2.39, p = 0.13, F2 < 1. In error
The performance for the 80 fillers corresponding to the experimental tri-
syllabic words of Chetail and Content (2014) was analysed. The hiatus words
(entailing fewer vowel cluster units) were estimated shorter than the control
words, which was confirmed by both NHST (β = −5.75, p < 0.001) and
Bayesian (BF10 > 1000) analyses. This replicated the effect of number of vowel
cluster units.
5
Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
Experiment 3: Case mixing lexical decision task
In the two next experiments, we tested the influence of graphemes
during lexical access. First, we used the case mixing lexical decision
task (e.g., Havelka & Frankish, 2010; Pring, 1981). Using this task,
Havelka and Frankish (2010) showed that visual disruption of the
graphemic structure of words delayed word recognition. More pre-
cisely, when five letter words were presented with case mixing, reaction
times were longer if complex graphemes were disrupted by case mixing
(e.g., sTeAk) than if only the overall shape of words was disrupted (e.g.,
stEAk). On the other hand, the pattern of case mixing had no significant
effect on response times for words with single letter vowel graphemes
(e.g., gRuNt vs. grUNt). A similar design was used here to test whether
this effect could be replicated.
Participants. The participants were the same as in Experiment 1.
Materials. Forty-two pairs of five letter words were selected from
the Lexique database (New et al., 2004) so that one word had a complex
vowel grapheme (e.g., veine) and one had only simple graphemes (e.g.,
tarte). The two conditions were matched on word frequency, number of
syllables, morphemes, and orthographic neighbourhood (see Appendix
A). In the complex grapheme condition, 38 words had the critical
grapheme at position 2–3 (e.g., veine) and four at the position 3–4 (e.g.,
scout). The words were presented on the screen according to two con-
ditions of case mixing (Table 4). In the disruptive condition, only one
letter of the complex grapheme was in uppercase (e.g., vEiNe, sCoUt).
Uppercase was applied at the same positions in the simple grapheme
condition (e.g., tArTe and tRaMe respectively). In the non-disruptive
condition, the whole grapheme was in uppercase in the complex gra-
pheme condition (e.g., vEIne, scOUt), and uppercase was applied at the
same positions in the simple grapheme condition (e.g., tARte and trAMe
respectively). For negative responses, 84 pseudowords were devised.
They were matched with words on number of letters, type of graphemes
and mixing case. Two counterbalanced lists of materials were created so
that each participant saw a given word only once in one of the case
conditions and all the words were presented in both conditions of
mixing case across participants.
Procedure. Participants performed a lexical decision task. For each
trial, a fixation cross was displayed for 500 ms, and immediately fol-
lowed by a stimulus which remained on the screen until the participants
responded. Participants had to decide as quickly and as accurately as
possible whether the stimulus was a French word or not by pressing one
of two buttons on a keyboard. Feedback was provided when they failed
to respond (red cross for 500 ms). All participants performed eight
practice trials before receiving the experimental trials in a different
random order.
Results and discussion
The mean correct reaction times and mean error rates averaged over
participants are presented in Table 5. We excluded the trials eliciting
very long (> 2,000 ms) or very short (< 300 ms) reaction times (0.87%
of the data). Three words were also excluded due to error rates higher
than 33% (faste, salve, plouc).
NHST analyses. The data were first submitted to separate ANOVAs
on the participant and item means for positive responses with grapheme
complexity and case mixing condition as factors. In reaction times, the
interaction between the two factors was significant, F1(1, 40) = 6.87,
p = 0.01, F2(1, 79) = 4.44, p = 0.04. However, simple effects showed
that the effect of case was significant neither in the condition ‘simple
grapheme’, F1(1, 40) = 3.63, p = 0.06, F2 < 1, nor in the condition
rates, neither the interaction nor the simple effects were significant (all
Fs < 1).
Bayesian analyses. To test the interaction effect, a model with the
two main effects was compared to a model with the two main effects
plus the interaction. For the two simple effects, models with the factor
F. Chetail
Table 4
Conditions and examples of items in Experiment 3 (mixing case lexical decision
task).
Case mixing condition
Grapheme Disruptive Non-disruptive
Simple tArTe tARte
Complex vEiNe vEIne
Table 5
Mean correct reaction times and error rates in Experiment 3 (mixing case lexical
decision task) according to grapheme complexity and case mixing (standard
deviations are presented in brackets).
Disruptive case Non-disruptive
case
Reaction times (in Simple grapheme 716 (86) 732 (72)
ms) Complex 731 (69) 715 (68)
grapheme
Error rates (in %) Simple grapheme 7.4 (14.0) 7.9 (13.9)
Complex 8.1 (14.1) 7.4 (15.6)
grapheme
‘case mixing’ were compared to a null model. As presented in Table 6,
none of the BF10 was positive in both the participant and the item
analyses, be it in reaction times or in error rates. Of particular interest,
BF10 were inferior to 1 for the simple effect in the condition ‘complex
grapheme’.
Although there is positive evidence neither for the interaction effect
nor for the simple effects, one could argue that at a descriptive level, the
difference between the disruptive case and the non disruptive case
conditions is in the expected direction for the complex grapheme con-
dition (delay of 16 ms). We therefore tested more participants, as de-
clared in the pre-registration form, to test whether we could gain more
evidence in favor of the effects. The same participants additionally
enrolled in Experiment 1 were added to the 41 original ones, leading
eventually to a set of 73 participants6. At a descriptive level, the dif-
ference between the two case conditions for the simple grapheme
condition remained stable (716 and 731 ms respectively). More im-
portantly, the 16 ms difference in the complex grapheme condition
disappeared, with a mean of 718 ms in case of disruptive case and a
mean of 719 ms in case of non disruptive case. Accordingly, the
Bayesian ANOVA conducted on the data of the 73 participants led to
evidence for a null effect both for the interaction and for the simple
effect in the complex grapheme condition (see Table 6). As in the two
previous experiments, we did not find any reliable evidence in favour of
the influence of graphemic structure in visual word recognition.
Experiment 4: Primed lexical decision task
In this experiment, we assessed the influence of graphemic structure
during lexical processing with a priming procedure close to the one
used by Lupker et al. (2012). The rationale was similar to the previous
experiment. Words were preceded by partial primes sharing all the
letters but two (e.g., ca–us – CACTUS)7. When target words have no
complex graphemes (e.g., CACTUS), the time to process them should be
similar whatever the position of the – in the prime (e.g., c–tus, ca–us)
because the number of shared letters and graphemes between the prime
6 neither the interaction between the two factors, F1(1, 40) = 1.01,
We added the data of 33 new participants (and not 34) due to a data loss for
one of them. Additionally, during the analyses, one of the 74 resulting parti-
cipants was excluded a priori since he/she was exceptionally long (mean re-
action times superior to the mean by 3 standard deviations).
7
Here, the two letters were replaced by – rather than by xs as in Lupker et al.
(2012) to avoid any confusion with the letter X.
6
Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
and the target is identical in the two priming conditions (four, in the
example). On the contrary, if the graphemic structure of words plays a
role during word recognition, the position of – should be critical in
words with complex graphemes. When a complex grapheme is broken
(e.g., grapheme CH, as in s–het – SACHET), the prime should be less
efficient than when the complex grapheme is kept intact (e.g., sa–et –
SACHET) because in the former condition, the prime disrupts the gra-
phemic structure, and primes and targets share one grapheme less than
in the latter condition. Longer reaction times are therefore expected for
disruptive primes compared to non-disruptive primes, but only in the
complex grapheme condition.
Participants. The participants were the same as in Experiment 1.
Materials. Forty pairs of six or seven letter words were selected
from the Lexique database (New et al., 2004). One word had a complex
medial consonant grapheme in position 3–4 (e.g., SACHET) and one
had simple graphemes at the same position (e.g., CACTUS). The two
conditions were matched on word frequency, on the number of letters,
syllables, morphemes, and on orthographic neighbourhood. We used
consonant graphemes (e.g., CH, GN) because we wanted words to have
the same consonant–vowel pattern (e.g., CVCCVC for sachet and cactus).
In doing so, the number of consonants shared by primes and targets
were balanced in the two conditions (see Duñabeitia & Carreiras, 2011;
New, Araújo, & Nazzi, 2008). For each word, two related primes were
devised (Table 7). In the disruptive priming condition, primes were
formed by replacing two letters of the target word with ‘–’ such that the
critical grapheme in the complex grapheme condition was disrupted
(i.e., the prime included a broken grapheme: e.g., sac–t – SACHET). The
letters at the same position were removed in the simple grapheme
condition (e.g., cac–s – CACTUS). In the non-disruptive condition, letter
replacement was done so that neither the critical grapheme nor any
other complex grapheme in the word was affected (e.g., sa–et – SACHET
and ca–us – CACTUS). For negative responses, 80 pseudowords were
devised, matched with words on number of letters, type of graphemes
and structure (see Appendix A). Two priming conditions were also
devised for pseudowords. Finally, two counterbalanced lists of mate-
rials were designed so that each participant saw a given word only once
in one of the conditions and all the words were presented in both
priming conditions across participants.
Procedure. Participants performed a primed lexical decision task.
For each trial, a fixation cross was displayed for 500 ms, followed by a
mask for 500 ms (same number of # as the prime). After the mask, the
prime was displayed in lowercase for 50 ms and immediately followed
by the target in uppercase which remained on the screen until the
participants responded. Participants had to decide as quickly and as
accurately as possible whether the target was a French word or not by
pressing one of two buttons on a keyboard. Feedback was provided
when they failed to respond (red cross for 500 ms). All participants
performed eight practice trials before receiving the experimental trials
in a different random order.
Results and discussion
The mean correct reaction times and mean error rates averaged over
participants are presented in Table 8. We excluded the trials eliciting
very long (> 2,000 ms) or very short (< 300 ms) reaction times (0.65%
of the data). Three words were also excluded due to an error rate higher
than 33% (jucher, dolmen, cagnard).
NHST analyses. The data were submitted to separate ANOVAs on
the participant and item means for positive responses with grapheme
complexity and case mixing condition as factors. In reaction times,
p = 0.32, F2(1, 75) = 2.18, p = 0.14, nor the simple effects (all
Fs < 1) was significant. Similarly in error rates, neither the interaction
nor the simple effects were significant (all Fs < 1).
Bayesian analyses. The analyses were similar to Experiments 1 and
3. As presented in Table 9, all the BF10 were inferior to 1, and half of
F. Chetail Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085

Table 6
Summary of statistical results in Experiment 3 (mixing case lexical decision task).
DV Effect NHST Bayesian ANOVA (N = 41) Bayesian ANOVA (N = 73)

P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses

RTs Interaction p = 0.01 p = 0.04 BF10 = 1.55 BF10 = 0.45 BF10 = 0.37 BF10 = 0.26
Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p = 0.06 p = 0.39 BF10 = 1.01 BF10 = 0.53 BF10 = 1.11 BF10 = 0.50
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p = 0.13 p = 0.38 BF10 = 0.62 BF10 = 0.54 BF10 = 0.17 BF10 = 0.40
Error rates Interaction p = 0.49 p = 0.47 BF10 = 0.28 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.22 BF10 = 0.24
Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p = 0.61 p = 0.78 BF10 = 0.26 BF10 = 0.41 BF10 = 0.21 BF10 = 0.40
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p = 0.61 p = 0.94 BF10 = 0.26 BF10 = 0.41 BF10 = 0.19 BF10 = 0.40

Notes. DV = dependant variable, RTs = reaction times, P = participant, I = item.

them indicate substantial evidence in favor of the null hypothesis.
Consistently with the three previous experiments and with Lupker
et al. (2012), we found no evidence supporting any impact of the gra-
phemic structure in the lexical decision task. Reaction times and error
rates were similar for primes that did not preserve the graphemic
structure of the target (e.g., s–het – SACHET) and primes that did (e.g.,
c–tus - CACTUS).
Experiment 5: Primed lexical decision task
In Experiment 4, one could argue that the fact that the priming
effect (difference between disruptive vs. non-disruptive primes) did not
differ between words entailing a complex grapheme and words with a
simple grapheme simply ensues from an ineffective priming manip-
ulation. Indeed, the design of the experiment did not enable us to test
the presence of a mere priming effect because we did not include a
control priming condition. We therefore ran a fifth experiment, fol-
lowing the same logic as in Experiment 4 but with control primes.
The same target words were used, with two priming conditions. In
the first condition (related condition), we used the disruptive primes of
Experiment 4 (e.g., cac–s –CACTUS). In the second condition (unrelated
condition), we used partial primes including two hypens (–) at the same
position as in the related prime while at the other positions there was
no letter overlap with the target (e.g., tur–e – CACTUS). We expected a
main effect of priming, with related primes leading to shorter reaction
times than unrelated ones. If the graphemic structure of words plays a
role in visual word recognition, this effect should be smaller in words
with a complex graphemic structure than in words with a simple one,
since in the former condition, the related prime has a broken grapheme.
If, as demonstrated by the four first experiments, the graphemic
structure of words does not impact visual word processing, a priming
effect should be found, but without any interaction with the type of
words (simple vs. complex).
Participants. Forty new volunteer participants were enrolled in this
experiment. All were native speakers of French with normal to cor-
rected-to-normal vision and without any language disorder. They were
recruited at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).
Materials. We used the same word and pseudoword targets as in
Experiment 4. In one condition, the word had a complex medial con-
sonant grapheme in position 3–4 (e.g., SACHET) and in the other
condition the word had simple graphemes at the same position (e.g.,
CACTUS). For each word, two primes were devised (Table 10). In the
related priming condition, we used the same primes as in Experiment 4.
As a reminder, primes were formed by replacing two letters of the target
word with ‘–’ such that the critical grapheme in the complex grapheme
condition was disrupted (i.e., the prime included a broken grapheme:
e.g., s–het – SACHET). The letters at the same position were removed in
the simple grapheme condition (e.g., c–tus – CACTUS). The second
priming condition consisted of unrelated partial primes, which entailed
two hyphens at the same position as in the related primes, and with no
letter overlap with targets at the other positions (e.g., oin–r – SACHET
and tur–e – CACTUS). Primes for pseudowords were adapted accord-
ingly.
Procedure. The procedure was the same as in Experiment 4.
Results and discussion

Table 7 For the analyses, we used the same procedure as in Experiment 4.

Conditions and examples of items in Experiment 4 (primed lexical decision However, given that Experiment 5 was specifically designed to ensure
task). the presence of a general priming effect, we reported the results of
Priming condition inferential statistics for the main effect of priming, in addition to the
interaction and simple effects.
Grapheme Disruptive prime Non-disruptive prime The mean correct reaction times and mean error rates averaged over
participants are presented in Table 11. We excluded the trials eliciting
Simple cac–s – CACTUS ca–us – CACTUS
Complex sac–t – SACHET sa–et – SACHET very long (> 2,000 ms) or very short (< 300 ms) reaction times (0.30%
of the data). Applying the criterion of three standard deviations, two
participants were excluded, one because of a high percentage of errors
and one because of an overall high mean of reaction times. Finally, four
Table 8
words were also excluded due to an error rate higher than 33% (jucher,
Mean correct reaction times and error rates in Experiment 4 (primed lexical
dolmen, cagnard, bagnard).
decision task) according to grapheme complexity and priming (standard de-
viations are presented in brackets).
NHST analyses. The data were submitted to separate ANOVAs on
the participant and item means for positive responses with grapheme
Disruptive prime Non-disruptive complexity and prime type as factors. In reaction times, there was a
prime
main effect of prime type, with related primes leading to shorter re-
Reaction times (in Simple grapheme 699 (57) 695 (63) action times than unrelated primes, F1(1, 37) = 37.59, p < 0.001,
ms) Complex 702 (49) 709 (72) F2(1, 74) = 24.85, p < 0.001. There was no significant effect of in-
grapheme teraction (all Fs < 1), while consistently, the two simple effects were
Error rates (in %) Simple grapheme 6.1 (16.0) 6.1 (15.1)
significant (see Table 12). There was no significant effect on error rates.
Complex 7.7 (15.3) 7.4 (15.2)
grapheme Bayesian analyses. The analyses provided evidence for a main ef-
fect of priming (BF for the model with the priming factor compared to

7
F. Chetail Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085

Table 9
Summary of statistical results in Experiment 4 (primed lexical decision task).
DV Effect NHST Bayesian analysis

P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses

RTs Interaction p = 0.32 p = 0.14 BF10 = 0.37 BF10 = 0.31

Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p = 0.54 p = 0.47 BF10 = 0.27 BF10 = 0.48
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p = 0.43 p = 0.67 BF10 = 0.32 BF10 = 0.42
Error rates Interaction p = 0.84 p = 0.87 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.23
Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p = 0.99 p = 0.97 BF10 = 0.23 BF10 = 0.38
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p = 0.77 p = 0.86 BF10 = 0.23 BF10 = 0.39

Notes. DV = dependant variable, RTs = reaction times, P = participant, I = item.

Table 10 General discussion

Conditions and examples of items in Experiment 5 (primed lexical decision
task). The study was conducted to test whether or not graphemes are
Priming condition sublexical units influencing the processes of visual word recognition in
skilled readers. Overall, no reliable evidence for such an influence was
Grapheme Related prime Unrelated prime found over five experiments, each using different tasks taping onto
different processes of word processing. This was confirmed by both
Simple cac–s – CACTUS tur–e – CACTUS
Complex sac–t – SACHET oin–r – SACHET NHST and Bayesian analyses.

Table 11 Alternative explanations

Mean correct reaction times and error rates in Experiment 5 (primed lexical
decision task) according to grapheme complexity and priming (standard de- One could put forward several alternative explanations to the ab-
viations are presented in brackets). sence of grapheme effects in the current experiments. First, grapheme
Related prime Unrelated prime
effects would emerge only for low-frequency words (e.g., Rey et al.,
1998). However, we used low- to medium-frequency words in the four
Reaction times (in ms) Simple grapheme 714 (39) 743 (53) experiments (mean: 7.55, 13.32, 17.47, and 11.29 occurrences per
Complex grapheme 722 (61) 750 (54) million, respectively), with frequency means and ranges more or less
Error rates (in %) Simple grapheme 5.9 (16.2) 6.6 (14.3)
similar (or even lower) to those used in previous studies reporting
Complex grapheme 6.0 (14.1) 7.3 (13.6)
significant effects (e.g., 144 in Commissaire and Casalis, Exp. 1; 11.3 in
Rey et al., 1998; 5.1 in Rey et al., 2000, Exp. 1A; 4.00 in Rey et al.,
the null model). Critically, the evidence was in favour of the null hy- 2000, Exp. 1B; 139 in Rey et al., 2000, Exp. 2).
pothesis for the interaction. In the two conditions of words, the analyses Second, recent studies showed that grapheme cohesion could in-
for the simple effects led to the same results: an extreme evidence of fluence the presence of graphemic effects. Grapheme cohesion refers to
priming effect in the participant analyses, but much weaker in the item the systematicity with which a bigram (i.e. two adjacent letters) cor-
analyses. responds to a grapheme unit in print. In French for example, AU and CH
This additional experiment clearly suggests that the absence of are highly cohesive because they systematically correspond to a single
modification of the priming effect according to the graphemic variable grapheme made of two letters (AU = > /ɔ/, CH = > /ʃ/). On the
in Experiment 4 was not due to an overall absence of priming effect. contrary, EN has a weak cohesion because it corresponds either to two
First, we report here a clear priming effect on reaction times. Second, simple graphemes (e.g., EN corresponding to /ən/ in TENIR, /təniʀ/) or
this priming effect was not affected by the graphemic structure of items: to a single complex grapheme (e.g., EN corresponding to /ẽ/ in TENTE,
The graphemic structure being preserved or not between primes and /tẽt/). In the letter detection task, Spinelli, Kandel, Guerassimovitch,
targets, the primes have the same impact on targets. This fifth experi- and Ferrand (2012) showed that graphemic effects were found with
ment therefore leads to the same conclusion as in other experiments: highly cohesive complex graphemes but not with low cohesive ones.
The graphemic structure of words does not influence visual word re- However, in the letter detection task conducted in Experiment 1, the
cognition. complex graphemes used in both conditions of phonological overlap
were highly cohesive, thus supposed to lead to positive grapheme ef-
fects. More generally, we used only graphemes of high cohesion in the

Table 12
Summary of statistical results in Experiment 5 (primed lexical decision task).
DV Effect NHST Bayesian analysis

P analyses I analyses P analyses I analyses

RTs Prime type p < 0.001 p < 0.001 BF10 = 20,122 BF10 = 3.03
Interaction p = 0.93 p = 0.93 BF10 = 0.21 BF10 = 0.23
Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p < 0.001 p = 0.08 BF10 = 104 BF10 = 1.38
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p < 0.001 p = 0.08 BF10 = 233 BF10 = 1.41
Error rates Prime type p = 0.22 p = 0.28 BF10 = 0.29 BF10 = 0.22
Interaction p = 0.79 p = 0.59 BF10 = 0.24 BF10 = 0.25
Simple effect in the condition ‘simple grapheme’ p = 0.58 p = 0.48 BF10 = 0.27 BF10 = 0.40
Simple effect in the condition ‘complex grapheme’ p = 0.35 p = 0.80 BF10 = 0.38 BF10 = 0.50

Notes. DV = dependant variable, RTs = reaction times, P = participant, I = item.

8
F. Chetail
four experiments.
Furthermore, still in the letter detection task, it has been argued that
the position of the letter to be detected would be critical since effects
were reported only when the letter was at the second position of
complex graphemes (e.g., Brand et al., 2007, Exp. 3). For example, U
was detected more slowly in BOULE than in BRUNE, but there was no
difference between the detection of A in GLAND versus in GLACE.
However, although it was not possible to have a look at the stimuli since
they were not available, one can wonder –based on the example–
whether this interaction between graphemic structure and letter posi-
tion was not confounded with graphemic cohesion. No effect could
have been obtained for A in GLAND not because the letter to be de-
tected was at the first position, but because the letter to be detected was
embedded in a low-cohesion grapheme. Furthermore, it should be
noted that other studies reported graphemic effects in the letter de-
tection task even when all or part of the letters to be detected were in
the first position of the complex grapheme (e.g., Commissaire & Casalis,
2018; Marinus & de Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000).
During data collection, a new study dealing with the same issue was
published (Commissaire & Casalis, 2018). This work is interesting be-
cause it also tested graphemic effects with different tasks, in adults. The
data showed a significant graphemic effect in the letter detection task
but not in the primed lexical decision task with a similar design as in
Lupker et al. (2012) and in Experiment 4. According to the authors, this
demonstrates that graphemes play a role as orthographic units and that
they are used within a sub-lexical route to reading only, not during
more direct lexical access. Our results in the lexical decision task (Ex-
periments 3 and 4) are consistent with those of Commissaire and Casalis
(2018) but not those obtained in the letter detection task, since we
found no effect (Experiments 1). Indeed, given that we found a see-
mingly grapheme effect only when there was a phonemic overlap be-
tween the letter name and the phonological word form, we can rea-
sonably conclude that this effect was due to the phonological confound
per se and not to the graphemic manipulation. In Commissaire and
Casalis (2018), the few examples given suggest that the graphemic
manipulation co-varied with the phonological overlap between target
letters and carrier words. In the condition ‘simple grapheme’, which led
to shorter reaction times, the name of the letter was present in the
phonological form of the carrier word (e.g., A /ɑ/ in PHARE /fɑʀ/),
whereas in the ‘complex grapheme condition’, the carrier word did not
include it (e.g., A /ɑ/ in CHAUD, /ʃo/). Once again, the presence of the
effect may therefore be due, not the graphemic structure of the words
per se, but to this phonological confound.
More generally, it seems that almost all the experiments which in-
vestigated the grapheme effects in the letter detection task exhibited the
same phonological confound (e.g., Brand et al., 2007, Exp 3; Marinus &
de Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000, Experiments 1A, 1B).8 To our knowl-
edge, the only experiment that directly addressed the confound was the
Experiment 3 in Rey et al. (2000), but a closer look shows that only half
of the data are conclusive. When the letter name was included in both
the targets with and without complex graphemes (e.g., O in FLOAT vs.
O in SLOPE), the letter was significantly more slowly detected when it
was embedded in a complex grapheme than in a simple one. This
supports the hypothesis that graphemes are perceptual units. The other
half of the materials was devised so that, that time, the letter name was
not included in both the targets with and without complex graphemes
(e.g., O in CLOUD vs. O in PROVE). However, in that case, there was no
significant difference between the two grapheme conditions. This result
contradicts a potential role of graphemes as perceptual units. Hence,
8
Marinus and de Jong (2011) indicated that, to control for the phonemic
similarity of the letter names and the word phonological forms, they took letters
which name was different from the pronunciation of the letter within the carrier
word in the simple grapheme condition. In most cases, however, the pro-
nunciation of the vowels remains phonetically very close (e.g., /i/ and /ɪ/).
9
Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
overall, even if the influence of the graphemic structure has been tested
a lot in the letter detection task, leading to positive effects which are
taken as the evidence that graphemes are perceptual units, these effects
seem to be artifactual.
Implications for models of visual word recognition
Nobody would question the special status of graphemes in alpha-
betic scripts. They are the basis of the correspondence code between
print and speech. This intermediate level of representation between
letter units and phonological-based units is therefore fundamental in
reading acquisition. A basic explicit knowledge of one-to-one gra-
pheme-phoneme correspondences is most of the time enough for de-
veloping readers to activate the phonological form associated with
regular words, and thus access the corresponding meaning (Share,
1995). However, the question addressed here is whether this special
status of graphemes still exists beyond explicit decoding. Reading
models offer different answers to this question.
The major current models can be grouped into two main frame-
works: Those using localist representations and those using distributed
representations. In the former ones, individual units stand for familiar
elements such as letters or words, whereas in the latter ones, each such
elements are represented by particular patterns of activity over many
different units rather than by the activity of a single unit (Plaut, 2004).
The graphemic issue has been mostly discussed in localist representa-
tion models (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Diependaele et al., 2010;
Grainger & Ziegler, 2011; Perry et al., 2007a,b, 2010) because it di-
rectly influences the need to incorporate graphemic units and a gra-
phemic parsing process to simulate visual word recognition and reading
aloud. Most of these models endorse a dual-route approach, although
the term “dual route” does not always refer to the same things. DRC-like
models such as DRC models per se (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001), the BIA
model (Diependaele et al., 2010), and CDP + models (e.g., Perry et al.,
2007a,b, 2010) include two pathways. One –usually referred to as the
direct route or the lexical route–, enables sublexical orthographic in-
formation to make direct contact with whole-word orthographic re-
presentations, which in turn provide access to whole-word phonology
and rich semantic information. This route is usually based on the
principles of the interaction activation (IA) model (McClelland &
Rumelhart, 1981). In the other route –referred to as the indirect or
sublexical route–, sublexical orthographic information is first trans-
formed into a sublexical phonological code, which then provides access
to whole-word phonological representations and semantics, or directly
drives articulatory execution.
The dual-route model of orthographic processing (Grainger &
Ziegler, 2011) also includes two routes but both pathways account for
the orthographic processing of letter strings (i.e., lexical access). On the
first route, a coarse-grained orthographic code is computed in order to
rapidly make contact with whole-word orthographic representations
and their corresponding semantic representations. On this route, the
most visible combination of letters that best constrain word identity are
primarily coded. On the second route, a fine-grained orthographic code
is computed and provides more precise information about the ordering
of letters in the string compared to the code generated on the “coarse-
grained route”. The fine-grained code makes it possible to code for co-
occurring contiguous letter combinations which in turn leads to the
activation of the corresponding whole-word phonological and semantic
representations.
As presented in Table 13, these models differently envisage the need
to include grapheme units on the different routes. In DRC-like models
such as DRC, CDP+ or BIA, direct lexical access is simulated as pro-
posed in the IA model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), that is with
letter units that make direct contact with whole-word orthographic
units. Graphemes are therefore not assumed to influence processing. On
the indirect route, two different proposals have been put forward. In
CDP+ (e.g., Perry et al., 2007a,b, 2010) and BIA (Diependaele et al.,
F. Chetail
Table 13
Assumptions regarding graphemic coding in a set of major models of visual
word recognition and reading aloud.
Sublexical grapheme units
Yes No
Direct access/lexical Dual-route model of orthographic CDP+ models
route processing (via the fine-grained BIA model
orthography route) DRC models
IA model and
IA-based
models
Indirect access/ CDP+ models DRC models
sublexical route BIA model
2010) models, mapping between letters and phonemes is mediated by a
grapheme processing stage whereby a letter string is first parsed and
segmented into grapheme units so that the resulting units are compa-
tible with the graphemic buffer. Since graphemic parsing occurs before
any phonological sublexical activation, the grapheme units activated
can be considered as orthographic units per se in this framework
(Commissaire & Casalis, 2018). In DRC models on the contrary, the non-
lexical route operates letter by letter, and not grapheme by grapheme.
Letter strings are analysed serially from left to right and the system
looks for a rule (in a list of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence
rules) which letters match the leftmost letters available in the process.
Rules with larger graphemes are tested before rules using smaller gra-
phemes, so that the route is able to correctly read items with multiletter
graphemes (see Coltheart et al., 2001; Rastle & Coltheart, 1998). Hence,
contrary to the indirect route in CDP+ models, there is no local gra-
pheme units in the DRC model of Coltheart et al. (2001). Finally, in the
model of Grainger and Ziegler (2011), the presence of graphemes as
orthographic units is envisaged during direct lexical access, through the
fine-grained orthography route. This pathway operates via a process of
chunking of letter strings into contiguous multiletter clusters corre-
sponding to multiletter graphemes and small morphemes. If this theo-
retical model is combined with the principles of the BIA model
(Grainger & Ziegler, 2011, Fig. 4), a three-route model of reading is
obtained, with graphemes shared by two out of three pathways. This
proposal is consistent with the hypothesis that the largest common units
shared by the lexical and sublexical routes could be grapheme units
(Lupker et al., 2012; Reggia, Marsland, & Berndt, 1988), conferring to
graphemes a status of perceptual units: They would serve both to make
direct contact with whole-word orthographic representations and to
activate phonology.
Even if only a few proposals would assume that the lexical route
incorporates a level of graphemic units (Table 10), claims according to
which grapheme units are “perceptual units” or “reading units” playing
a role in the early stages of visual word recognition are present in the
literature (e.g., Havelka & Frankish, 2010; Kandel & Spinelli, 2010;
Marinus & de Jong, 2011; Rey et al., 2000; Royer, Spinelli, & Ferrand,
2005). Lupker et al. (2012) seriously challenged such claims. Their four
experiments failed to provide evidence in favour of an influence of the
word graphemic structure in the primed lexical decision task. In the
present study, we replicated this absence of graphemic effects in the
primed lexical decision (Experiments 4 and 5), but the use of Bayesian
analyses enables us to draw stronger conclusions than the ones from
non-significant effects in the NHST framework. Moreover, we failed to
replicate the grapheme effect in the mixing case lexical decision task
(Experiment 3) reported by Havelka and Frankish (2010). Taken to-
gether, these data confirm Lupker et al. (2012) and Commissaire and
Casalis (2018)’s conclusion that the graphemic structure of words does
not play any particular role during direct lexical access in skilled
readers. This challenges any model that would postulate that grapheme
units are activated during direct lexical access, such as the dual-ap-
proach to orthography proposed by Grainger and Ziegler (2011).
10
Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085
On the other hand, Commissaire and Casalis (2018) obtained a
seemingly graphemic effect in the letter detection task, even if explicit
resort on subvocalisation was blocked. Based on this result, they con-
cluded that “grapheme units are activated independently of phonology
and can be considered as sublexical orthographic units per se in expert
readers” (p. 1335). The authors reasoned that the letter detection task
does not require mandatory lexical processing, but necessarily relies on
sublexical processing. Thus, finding a graphemic effect in this task
would support a status of functional “orthographic sublexical unit” for
graphemes. If one endorses a dual-route approach and conclude
otherwise that graphemes do not influence the access to whole-word
orthographic representations (lexical route), the results in the letter
detection task necessarily lead one to consider graphemes as ortho-
graphic units involved on the indirect route. This is indeed the con-
clusion of the authors, and this is compatible with the way CDP+ and
BIA models simulate word recognition and reading aloud on this route.
In such models, the explanation of the seemingly graphemic effect in
the letter detection task is straightforward: When a letters string is
presented, graphemic parsing occurs based on letter information,
leading to the activation of the relevant grapheme units. Delay in de-
tecting A in BEACH would arise because units coding for complex
graphemes such as EA compete with single-letter units E and A, and
thus delay letter detection.
However, our study throws new light on this issue, besides con-
firming that graphemes play no particular role during lexical access. We
did not find any evidence for a reliable grapheme effect in Experiment
1, which led us to a re-interpretation of the ‘grapheme effects’ pre-
viously reported in terms of phonological confound. In Experiment 2,
we also found no evidence for a grapheme effect in the length estima-
tion task, while this task successfully led to an influence of other units
(see Chetail & Content, 2014). Hence, taken together, the results de-
monstrate that graphemes do not play a special role at a sublexical
level, in addition of not playing a special role during lexical access. This
conclusion goes against models that integrate graphemes in their ar-
chitecture at a sublexical level, such as CDP+ (Perry et al., 2007a,b,
2010) and BIA (Diependaele et al., 2010) models. On the contrary, the
present results are compatible with the DRC model (e.g., Coltheart
et al., 2001) which does not include a sublexical level of grapheme units
while acknowledging the special status of graphemes when simulating
the access to phonology via a set of grapheme-to-phoneme correspon-
dence rules.
Conclusion
Our initial question was: Are graphemes perceptual units activated
during skilled visual word recognition? The answer is no. As already
underlined by Lupker et al. (2012), this conclusion does not mean that
graphemes are not central for print-to-sound recoding in alphabetic
scripts. This simply means that, in the complex hierarchy of detectors
activated during written word processing (e.g., Dehaene, Cohen,
Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Tadt, 1991), bigrams corresponding to
complex grapheme have no special status at a lexical and sublexical
levels in skilled readers. This conclusion is consistent with several lines
of research demonstrating that orthographic factors drive the perception
of written words at first in skilled readers such as word clustering in
bigrams (e.g., Grainger & Van Heuven, 2003), the organization of vowel
and consonant letters within words (e.g., Chetail & Content, 2012;
Chetail et al., 2014), or orthographic regularities of words (e.g., Chetail,
2017).
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Fabienne Chetail: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal ana-
lysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources,
Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
F. Chetail Journal of Memory and Language 111 (2020) 104085

Authors notes
This study was pre-registered the 02/22/2017 on Open Science
Framework (OSF). The pre-registration is available at https://osf.io/
6dpbm/. The data collection occurred from 02/03/2017 to 20/09/2017
for Experiments 1 to 4, after OSF approval of the pre-registration. Data
collection for Experiment 5 occurred after OSF pre-registration because
it was asked during the reviewing process. We thank Stessie Toumani
for contributing to data collection.
Supplementary material
All the materials, raw data, and scripts for the analyses are available
on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/nxkdq/.

Appendix A. Characteristics of the words used in the five experiments

Traditionally, researchers test the quality of stimulus matching in running t-tests. In doing so, paired t-tests lead to p > 0.10 for all the following
parameters. However, given the inappropriateness of this procedure, we rather computed Cohen’s ds. For the majority of the parameters, the effect
size was small or negligible.
Word frequency comes from the subtitle count in Lexique (New et al., 2004).
Means per condition are provided with standard deviations in brackets.
Experiment 1:

Phonological confound No phonological confound

Complex Grapheme Simple grapheme Cohen’s d Complex grapheme Simple grapheme Cohen’s d

Word frequency 5.4 (8.9) 4.4 (7.8) 0.13 3.9 (6.3) 6.0 (10.6) 0.24
Number of letters 6.4 (0.8) 6.4 (0.8) – 6.4 (0.8) 6.4 (0.8) –
Number of phonemes 4.6 (0.8) 5.1 (1.0) 0.53 4.9 (1.3) 5.4 (1.2) 0.39
Number of syllables 1.8 (0.6) 1.8 (0.5) 0.11 2.0 (0.6) 2.3 (0.5) 0.54
Number of morphemes 1.2 (0.4) 1.1 (0.4) 0.50 1.1 (0.2) 1.0 (0.4) 0.50
OLD20 1.8 (0.2) 1.8 (0.4) 0.07 2.2 (0.4) 2.2 (0.4) 0.05

Experiment 2:

Long words Short words Cohen’s d

Number of phonemes* 6.6 (0.8) 3.6 (0.7) 4.98

Word frequency 14.1 (54.0) 14.4 (54.1) 0.01
Number of letters 6.4 (0.8) 6.4 (0.8) –
Number of syllables 2.1 (0.4) 2.1 (0.4) –
Number VC 2.1 (0.5) 2.1 (0.5) –
Number of morphemes 1.1 (0.3) 1.1 (0.3) 0.22
OLD21 2.1 (0.3) 2.0 (0.3) 0.38

*Factor manipulated.

Experiment 3:

Complex grapheme Simple grapheme Cohen’s d

Word frequency 17.8 (21.3) 17.2 (22.0) 0.03

Number of letters 5.0 (0.0) 5.0 (0.0) –
Number of syllables 1.0 (0.0) 1.0 (0.2) 0.22
Number of morphemes 1.0 (0.2) 1.0 (0.2) –
OLD21 1.5 (0.2) 1.5 (0.2) 0.04

Experiments 4–5:

Complex grapheme Simple grapheme Cohen’s d

Word frequency 11.2 (17.7) 11.4 (18.3) 0.01

Number of letters 6.3 (0.5) 6.3 (0.5) –
Number of syllables 2.1 (0.3) 2.1 (0.3) –
Number of morphemes 1.1 (0.2) 1.1 (0.3) 0.09
OLD21 1.8 (0.2) 1.8 (0.3) 0.33

Appendix B. Supplementary material

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104085.

11
F. Chetail
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