Schuit, Renee2021-07-242021-07-242020http://hdl.handle.net/2440/131286This item is only available electronically.It is widely known that visuospatial attention is critical for reading, especially for the phonological decoding of unfamiliar letter strings (Montani, et al., 2014). The current study aims to narrow the knowledge gap that currently exists between the disruption of visuospatial attention and parsing – more specifically; how the distribution of phonology affects the parsing of letters by exploring syllable number and vowel length effects. When conducting this experiment, 38 participants were assigned to one of four conditions to analyse 240 non-ambiguous and 20 ambiguous stimuli. Participants had to decipher whether the stimuli had two or three syllables. All stimuli were split into two equally counterbalanced groups and presented in either a static or a jiggling format – to replicate disrupted visuospatial attention. The results show that the jiggling effect displayed no significant difference in RTs or error rates with either of the ambiguous or non-ambiguous stimuli. Results for the syllable length effect showed that non-ambiguous two syllable stimuli had faster RTs and accuracy and that ambiguous stimuli recorded significantly faster three syllable RTs in comparison to two syllables – giving evidence against syllable length effects. We also found that participants do have a significant preference for long vowels over short vowels for two syllable stimuli and short vowels over long vowels for three syllable stimuli. Overall, the initial hypotheses about visuospatial attention are uninformative. Limitations such as the lack of effectiveness from the jiggling effect and negative effect of the button-pressing should be considered in future studies.Honours; PsychologyThesis