Sublexical Structures in Visual Word Recognition: Access Units or Orthographic Redundancy?
Max Coltheart · 2016
There have been several proposals that complex words are parsed or decomposed into sublexical units as part of the recognition process. These sublexical units (sometimes termed access units; Taft, 1985) are then used to search lexical memory until an entry is found that corresponds to the input string. Examples of this approach include the Spoehr and Smith (1973) model, in which the access units were assumed to be syllables and the parsing heuristics were based on iterative application of Hansen and Rodgers’ (1968) A P P R -r syllabification rules; Taft’s (1979a) prefix stripping model, in which the access unit is the stem of a prefixed word, and the parsing heuristics simply strip prefixes to yield stems; and Taft’s (1979b) BOSS model, in which the access unit (“BOSS”) is defined as “ the first part of the stem morpheme of a word, up to and including all consonants following the first vowel, but without creating an illegal consonant cluster in its final position” (Taft, this volume). Examples include LANT in LANTERN and RHUB in RHUBARB.