Certain theories of reading assume the representation and manipulation of sublexical entities while others do not. Consistent with the latter, M. Seidenberg (1987, in Attention and performance XII: The psychology of reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum; 1989, in Linguistic Structure i in Language Processing. Dordrecht: Kluwer) and M. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland (1989, Psychological Review, 96, No. 4, 523-568) have proposed that previously reported effects of syllabic and morphological structure can be best understood as resulting from the common co-occurrence of these sublexical entities and a pattern of bigram frequencies referred to as a "bigram trough." This claim is examined using lexical decision and illusory conjunction paradigms. The reliable effects of syllabic and morphological structure that are observed cannot, however, be accounted for by the presence or absence of bigram troughs. The implications of such findings for the connectionist theory of reading proposed by M. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland (op. cit.) are discussed. © 1992.
