ABSTRACT
The series of experiments reported in this paper examines the status of the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS) in word recognition. The BOSS is the first syllable of a word defined in morphological and orthographic terms. The first three experiments use three different experimental paradigms to demonstrate that a word divided after its BOSS is faster to process than one divided after its phonological first syllable. Doubts about the definition of the BOSS led to Experiment 4 which examined whether the transitional probability of a medial consonant cluster influenced which consonants were included in the BOSS. However, no significant effect of bigram frequency was observed. The final experiment demonstrated that nonwords which are one letter different to a word take longer to classify as nonwords than those with the same BOSS but which are more than one letter different to a word (e.g., MOBOT versus MOBUS). This result proved to be a problem for the strongest characterisation of the BOSS in the word recognition process, but not an insurmountable one.
