Psycholinguistic variables in visual word recognition and pronunciation of European Portuguese words: a mega-study approach

An increasing number of psycholinguistic studies have adopted a megastudy approach to explore the role that different variables play in the speed and/or accuracy with which words are recognised and/or pronounced in different languages. However, despite evidence for deep and shallow orthographies, little is known about the role that several orthographic, phonological and semantic variables play in visual word recognition and word production of words from intermediate-depth languages, as European Portuguese (EP). The current study aimed to overcome this gap, by collecting lexical decision and naming data for a large pool of words selected to closely represent the diversity of the EP language. Results from multiple regression analyses conducted on the latency data from both tasks place EP in-between the results previously observed in other deep- and shallow-orthographies. These findings indicate that EP represents a pivotal language to study the universality of the processes/mechanisms involved in skilled reading across languages.
This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds, and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). It is also part of the research project "Procura Palavras (P-Pal): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words" (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008).