Anagrams and Syllables The syllable effect in anagram solution: Unrecognised evidence from past studies

Six previous studies of the variables affecting anagram solution are reexamined for the evidence that number of syllables contributes to solution difficulty. It was shown that the number of syllables in a solution word was confounded with imagery for one study and with digram frequency for another. More importantly it was shown that the number of syllables has a large effect on anagram solution difficulty in the re-analysis of the results from the other four studies. In these studies, the number of syllables was either more important than the principal variable examined in the experiment or the second most important variable. Overall the effect size for the number of syllables was large, d = 1.14. The results are discussed in the light of other research and it is suggested that anagram solution may have more in common with other word identification and reading processes than has been previously thought. 3 Anagrams and Syllables Recently Novick and Sherman (2008) provided evidence that good and poor solvers of anagrams are influenced by different types of information when solving anagrams. Specifically they found that “superficial features” of anagrams like pronounceability have a greater effect on solution difficulty for poor problem solvers, whereas “structural features” like the number of syllables have a greater effect on good anagram solvers. This study was novel partly because it looked at the difference between good and poor solvers but mainly because it was the first study to suggest that syllables have an effect on anagram solution difficulty. It is the latter discovery which is the subject of this paper, which will concentrate on the possible effect of the number of syllables on all participants, rather than the differential effect on good and poor solvers. In many ways it is surprising that the possible role of the number of syllables has been ignored until now, as the literature on visual word recognition has suggested an important role for the syllable (Spoehr & Smith, 1973). There is also increasing empirical evidence that the syllable is an important unit in language production (Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994) and also in visual word processing (Ferrand, Segui & Grainger, 1996). Furthermore, it has been pointed out before that anagram solution could be conceptualized as a lexical access task (Fink & Weisberg, 1981), in which letters are rearranged and then the solution word is retrieved from memory (Mendelsohn, 4 Anagrams and Syllables 1976). As such is might be expected to share some of the features of other lexical access tasks. The literature on anagram solution, however, has tended to treat anagrams as outside of normal word identification or reading paradigms and, therefore, has ignored variables that have been shown to be important in these tasks. This is not to propose a monolithic theory that explains all lexical access tasks including anagrams, nor to argue that the syllable is necessarily the link between all of these tasks. It is accepted that the tasks may be affected by similar variables because they might be analogous rather than homologous. It should also be remembered that the role of the syllable in other lexical access tasks is far from universally agreed. For example, Goldblum and Frost (1988) argued that the syllable was an important unit when solving crossword puzzle clues, but this was disputed by Srinivas, Roediger and Rajaram (1992). The role of the syllable in word naming and lexical decision tasks is also far from clear with many conflicting results (Stenneken, Conrad & Jacobs, 2007). For example, Ferrand, Segui and Humphreys (1997) observed a syllable congruency effect in word naming in which participants are quicker to name a word if they are given a syllable congruent prime, but this was not replicated by Schiller (1999). The role of the syllable may also differ between languages. For example, in Spanish visual word recognition, the syllable frequency effect is inhibitory but in English, syllable frequency has a facilitative effect (Macizo & Van Petten, 2007). It is possible that an examination of the role of the syllable in anagram solution may shed light on some of these discrepancies. At the very least, however, it is hoped that it will confirm that there is a syllable effect in 5 Anagrams and Syllables anagram solution and explain how most of us solve anagrams. In this paper previous studies of anagram solution will be examined for the possibility of a syllable effect on participants who have not been selected for their ability to solve anagrams. This syllable effect, however, may have been missed because the number of syllables in solution words has been ignored. It should be noted that Novick and Sherman (2008) provide inadvertent evidence that the number of syllables is an important determinant of anagram difficulty in their screening pretest. This was an ecologically valid measure of anagram ability which contained 20 difficult five letter anagrams from those appearing in daily newspapers across the United States (Arnold & Lee, 1973). The anagrams were sinum, laveg, melip, yailg, oxmia, gunse, soule, mengo, limyk, vanie, wrope, watek, evirt; mykos, cuthe, pruns, mylad, suroc, doept, broep. Novick and Sherman point out these “anagrams are difficult because they require several letter moves for solution or because their solutions begin with a vowel or contain infrequent letter combinations. ” It is also worth noting, however, that 12 of the 20 anagrams are multisyllabic, which we would argue makes a major contribution to their difficulty. Many variables have been examined for their impact on the difficulty of anagram solution from word frequency, word concreteness, word imagery to bigram characteristics and anagram pronounceability (see Gilhooly and Johnson (1978) for a review). In this paper the results from six studies examining the variables which affect anagram solution difficulty will be reexamined. These studies were chosen because, as with all anagram studies before Novick and Sherman (2008) the impact of the number of syllables ______________________________________________________________ 6 Anagrams and Syllables 1 The solutions are minus, gavel, impel, gaily, axiom, genus, louse, gnome, milky, naïve, power, tweak, rivet, smoky, chute, spurn, madly, scour, depot/opted, probe. as a confounding variable was ignored, but for these studies sufficient detail was available to evaluate this impact. It will be demonstrated that for two of the studies, the number of syllables is as likely to have affected anagram solution as the proposed variable, and for four studies the impact of number of syllables will be quantified. In all cases the number of syllables was obtained from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2002). Evidence suggesting confounding effects in results from earlier studies Dewing and Hetherington (1974) looked at the effect of level of imagery (the ability of a word to evoke an image), on solution times of anagrams. Their ideas were based on an extension of Paivio‟s (1969) work on the importance of imagery in associative learning. In their experiments they showed that high imagery word anagrams were easier to solve than low imagery word anagrams. The anagrams were controlled for word length, number of solutions, letter order and frequency of letter pairs. However, four of the six low imagery words were disyllabic whereas only one of the high imagery words was disyllabic. It is, therefore, possible that this imagery effect was a number of syllables effect. The results of an experiment by Mayzner, Tresselt and Helbock (1964) which looked in detail at the solution of difficult six letter anagrams, might also have been confounded by the syllable effect. They found that the word „enigma‟ was solved significantly more slowly (median solution time) than the word „magnet‟, which both have similar word frequencies. Their explanation relies on letter position digram frequencies (two letter sequences which are 7 Anagrams and Syllables now called bigrams) which assess the frequency with which digrams appear in each position. They argued that Enigma has a lower digram total frequency than magnet and should therefore be harder to solve as the likelihood of each digram appearing in its position is lower. An alternative explanation might be that magnet has two syllables and enigma has three