Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In a German variant of a letter-detection experiment, native speakers of German read passages in German, searching for the letters d or t. Many more instances of the letter d. in definite articles and in the word and were missed than were missed in nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Subjects also missed more syllable final instances of the letter d. than syllable initial d or syllable-final t. The first finding supports earlier similar findings by Healy (e.g., 1976) for English, and Ferstl (1991) for German, with respect to high frequency words in the language being read in units larger than the letter. The second finding is understood in terms of the German phenomenon of neutralizing the difference in pronunciation between d and i in syllable-final position.