On the role of consonants and vowels in visual-word processing: Evidence with a letter search paradigm

Prior research has shown that the search function in the visual letter search task may reflect the regularities of the orthographic structure of a given script. In the present experiment, we examined whether the search function of letter detection was sensitive to consonant-vowel status of a pre-cued letter. Participants had to detect the presence/absence of a previously cued letter target (either vowel or consonant) at the initial, central or final position in a five-letter Spanish word or pseudoword. Results showed a significant effect of consonant-vowel status on letter search function which paralleled the orthographic constraints of Spanish. When searching for a consonant, participants showed faster identification of the initial position compared to the central and last positions. The opposite pattern was found for vowels. This result suggests a differential contribution of consonants and vowels to the identification of the orthographic structure of words, in terms of their relative position in Spanish words.