LAUSR

Abstract In the last decades, repeated evidence for graphemic effects has been reported in skilled readers. For example, a letter is more easily detected in a word when it corresponds to a simple grapheme (e.g., A in PLACE) than when it is embedded in a complex one (e.g., A in BEACH). Such effects have been taken as a demonstration that graphemes 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.