What is the letter é?

ABSTRACT Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish because, unlike French, accented and non-accented vowels only convey stress information. We conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment and a masked priming lexical decision experiment, each with three priming conditions (identity, visually similar, visually dissimilar). Results showed an advantage of the visually similar over the visually dissimilar condition. Furthermore, for non-accented primes, the visually similar condition was as effective as the identity condition. Thus, these findings suggest that: 1) accented and non-accented vowels share their abstract letter representations in Spanish; and 2) the nature of orthographic representations is molded by the characteristics of each language.