Morphographic Units in Dutch Polysyllabic Words: In Search of the Body of the BOSS |
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| Abstract: | In this article, 3 experiments are reported to find evidence for sublexical access units in Dutch as defined in terms of Taft's Body of the BOSS (BOB; Taft, 1992). Unlike Taft (1992), who tested his BOB hypothesis with nonwords only, real words were also used. It was hypothesized that if a possible BOB effect was to be established, this effect would only be found in pseudowords and not in real Dutch words. No evidence for a BOB effect was found, however. Experiment 2 was designed to check for possible disrupting effects of attention beep sounds used in the priming procedure of the first experiment. Once again, no evidence for BOB effects could be established. Experiment 3 directly addressed Taft's Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS) hypothesis (1979). In an attempt to replicate the results of Taft's experiments demonstrating the functional role of a BOSS, an experiment was designed following the same principles introduced by Taft in his 1979 study. Experiment 3 involved a lexical decision task, presenting words and pseudowords segmented visually into different units and sizes. No evidence for a BOSS could be found. In the discussion, alternative explanations of the results in terms of language-specific orthographic transparency are presented. |
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