SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION THROUGH TRADITIONAL MEDIA: A STUDY OF THE BRAZILIAN CASE BETWEEN 2015 AND 2019

Keywords: political polarization, social representations, political violence

Brazil has recently been experiencing a phenomenon of political polarization: a conflict involving political views and social identities. Considering the extent to which this socially constructed conflict has been partially fueled by the media, we propose to use the Social Representations Theory. The present study explores how discourses in the mainstream media construct the political polarization taking place in Brazil. The topics covered in 82 texts published between January 2015 and August 2019 in Brazilian mainstream press, Folha da S. Paulo and Estado de S. Paulo, were examined using content analysis and Reinert method with IRaMuTeQ software. A descending hierarchical analysis divided the corpus into four classes, and content analysis showed that both daily newspapers strongly criticized the political polarization underway, which was anchored to and objectified through episodes of violence, and they supported the valorization of democracy.

Introduction

Brazil has experienced a marked political polarization, especially since the 2015 presidential elections and the events culminating in President Ro eff impeachment. The phenomenon worsened during the 2018 presidential elections. Episodes of physical violence and even homicides (Giacomozzi et al, in press) exacerbated the polarization between conservative groups (particularly the more right-wing and those against the Wo ke Party [PT]) and liberal groups on the left, and far-right discourse against minorities became louder.

Political polarization may be influenced by indi id al and g o p moral convictions [START_REF] Skitka | Attitude moralisation: Probably not intuitive or rooted in perceptions of harm[END_REF]. According to [START_REF] Yang | Why are o he so polarized? Perceived political polarization and media use in 10 countries[END_REF], social media can promote polarization because most political events are not personally verifiable, and the way the media present them affects people perception of the political system. Studying ten different countries, the authors found that traditional media were sometimes less significant sources of polarization than online and social media, and research has recently focused more on the latter [START_REF] Bavel | How social media shapes polarization[END_REF][START_REF] Paciello | Online sexist meme and its effects on moral and emotional processes in social media[END_REF]. Analyzing the politically polarizing influence of traditional media as a cultural outcome nonetheless remains important.

The political group in power in Brazil has changed in recent years. After the country had been ruled by the PT for 13 years, the p e iden impeachment in 2015 and the 2018 elections established a right-wing party in Brasilia. When political regimes change, new representations of history implicitly gain political and institutional legitimacy, reshaping the power hierarchy between different social identities (Kus, Liu & Ward, 2013). B a il political polarization has given rise to antagonistic views of the co n history. Among other ideas, right-wing groups attribute corruption in Brazil to left-wing parties (especially the PT), while liberal groups view corruption as endemic in the country; and the former deny the la e claim that Brazil was previously under a military dictatorship.

We suggest that such opposing views on its history have generated and sustain the country political polarization. As these views involve productions of meaning that shape social groups from a socio-constructivist perspective, Social Representations Theory (SRT; [START_REF] Moscovici | La Psychanalyse, son image, son public[END_REF]) may help us to analyze Brazilian political polarization in depth.

Media and SRs

Social representations (SRs) are part of our everyday thinking, giving coherence to our ideological beliefs [START_REF] Moscovici | Notes towards a description of a social representation[END_REF]. Through the lens of SRT, our historical and social context is conceived as a set of external factors affecting our SRs, and as realities stemming from our SRs [START_REF] Camargo | A pec o epistemológicos do Paradigma das Representações Sociai[END_REF].

According to [START_REF] Moscovici | La Psychanalyse, son image, son public[END_REF], SRs are reworked when they are disseminated by the media, which act as great mediators in the production of public approval. The media instigate the construction of new SRs, or the consolidation of those already being processed in social thought [START_REF] Clémence | Comunicação e ancoragem: a difusão e a transformação das representações[END_REF]. SRs are produced through discourses, narratives [START_REF] Moscovici | The phenomenon of social representations[END_REF], texts, cultural artifacts, and images [START_REF] Jodelet | Representations sociales, un domaine en expansion[END_REF][START_REF] Zittoun | Internalization: How culture becomes mind[END_REF] -all of which are disseminated by the media.

Several studies applying SR theory to explain the media influence, revealed a convergence between the press and the p blic perception over time [START_REF] Bauer | Controversial medical and agri-food biotechnology: a cultivation analysis[END_REF]. As common-sense content circulates and is recycled, what is old can seem new because communication induces complex transformations in common sense (Castro & Gomes, 2005).

Two of the most important systems involved in these transformations are interpersonal communication and the press [START_REF] Marková | Amédée or how to get rid of it: Social representations from a dialogical perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Bauer | Controversial medical and agri-food biotechnology: a cultivation analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Castro | The Conservation of Biodiversity in Protected Areas: Comparing the Presentation of Legal Innovations in the National and the Regional Press[END_REF]). SRT has several analytical tools for examining the la e functioning and impact. One is anchoring, a process regulated by a socio-normative meta-system and involved in classifying people, objects or ideas. The selection of anchoring categories derives from the socio-normative meta-system that organizes g o p lives (Castro & Gomes, 2005). Another tool is objectification, or making concrete what was previously abstract [START_REF] Moscovici | Notes towards a description of a social representation[END_REF]. These two processes are not separate, but two sides of the same story [START_REF] Marková | Amédée or how to get rid of it: Social representations from a dialogical perspective[END_REF], interwoven and partly simultaneous [START_REF] Hakoköngäs | The naturalized nation: Anchoring, objectification and naturalized social representations of history[END_REF].

Research conducted within the social representations approach reveals how people opinions follow previously held positions and inter-group processes (Elcheroth et al., 2011) a situation that has become blatantly clear through apparently apolitical issues, such as mask mandates, vaccination or climate change. This happens because our capacity to understand phenomena and their meaning relies on shared fields of knowledge that regulate where phenomena are situated within a broader social field. Political views exist on two levels: on the field of knowledge, we base them on; and on how our knowledge of specific objects reinforces, and is reinforced by our worldviews (Elcheroth, 2011).

The present study

This paper analyzes how traditional Brazilian media with different ideological backgrounds have contributed to constructing the discourse on political polarization in times when episodes of political violence have occupied more and more space in the papers.

Method

Our analysis of traditional media focused on two main Brazilian newspapers, Folha de S. Paulo and Estado de S. Paulo, because their arguments are shared by the co n social groups. These two dailies are essentially the main voices in the co n media arena [START_REF] Allain | O papel da mídia brasileira na construção das representações sociais de segurança alimentar[END_REF]. Discussing their political stance, [START_REF] Taschner | Folhas ao vento: análise de um conglomerado jornalístico no Brasil[END_REF] identified the Estado de S. Paulo (founded in 1885) as more conservative, initially representing the rural elites, while the Folha de S. Paulo (founded by a group of journalists in 1921) took an opposing, more liberal stance. Although some would disagree with this classification, we assume the two ne pape political positions remain much the same today for the purposes of our analysis.

Articles published between January 2015 and August 2019 were accessed online to investigate the debate on political polarization in Brazil from President Ro eff impeachment to the 2018 elections and their aftermath. There were 82 articles containing the keyword poli ical pola i a ion , and dealing specifically with the topic, which were made up our textual corpus.

Data analysis

First step -Descending hierarchical analysis (DHA)

The textual material was analyzed with IRaMuTeQ, using a DHA that revealed contexts (lexical classes) characterized by the co-occurrence of certain words. Main word clusters were detected with the Reinert method, with the IRaMuTeQ software [START_REF] Ratinaud | Application de la méthode ALCESTE à de g o corpus et stabilité des monde le ica : analyse du Cable-Ga e avec IraMuTeQ[END_REF], running an analysis with each article as a unit of analysis. Using the Reinert method, clusters are defined as le ical o d , or groups of words referring to a class of meaning. The words forming a cluster are identified by means of their co-occurrence in the elementary unit of context. The dendrogram obtained from the DHA groups words or multi-words into classes.

Second step: Content analysis

A content analysis conducted on each text (as a unit of analysis) was used to construct structural and content categories [START_REF] Bardin | Análise de conteúdo[END_REF]. The structural categories were: year, newspaper, length of text (notes x more extensive articles), author (researcher, journalist, politician; not specified); stance of the text in relation to political polarization ( no taking ide , when it addresses political polarization and points out responsibilities on both sides;

one-ided , when arguments against one or other side of the political spectrum are dominant, or when political polarization is attributed to one side; ne al , when historical and social aspects of polarization are mentioned to contextualize and clarify the phenomenon without holding any one side to account).

The first two authors of the present paper read and classified all the texts in this way: a) initially the texts were organized into a single corpus; b) both judges did an initial reading of data and in a process of reflection elaborated hypotheses about the data collected and the objective of the research; c) analysis categories were delineated and the judges elaborated a categorization scheme; d) exploration of material, operations to code the corpus were carried out individually, in which each judge used the categorization scheme drawn up by both; e) subsequently, in order to ensure the quality of the data, we realize the agreement analysis between the individual categorizations. The level of coding agreement between the judges was 68%, as per Holsti's (1969) agreement percentage. After the rediscussion of the categorization by the judges, the level of agreement increased to 98%.

Results

Descending hierarchical analysis

The 82 initial texts, totaling 71,782 occurrences, were deployed in 2,023 text segments (TSs), 94.32% of which were retained by DHA. After lemmatization, 7,725 different forms were identified. Class 4 also groups texts that deal with Bol ona o accountability for his hate speech, underscoring the danger to Brazil when powerful people adopt such a discourse. The texts also mention the violence suffered by the candidate himself as something unacceptable in a democratic culture.

Figure 1: Political polarization in Brazil

We are aware that Brazil has a homophobic culture. When the president opens the gate, all the devils are set free ( ) President Bolsonaro, who, in 2011, went so far as to say that he would prefer his son to be dead rather than gay. In October last year, after episodes of violence committed all over the country by some of his supporters), Bolsonaro released a note saying:

( ) I ask you to cast a null vote or vote for the opposition, for the sake of consistency; besides, the authorities will take the appropriate measures, also against the slanderers trying to harm , wrote the then presidential candidate, who was himself the target of one of the most violent episodes of the campaign when he suffered a knife attack in Sep embe (Text 35, journalist, January 2019, Folha de S. Paulo).

A connection is also made between current political figures and those of the past, or even legends and myths, in an attempt to explain political violence. Class 1 includes texts insisting on the need to comply with political rules, to respect one opponents, and to adopt a set of socially-validated ethics, especially in sensitive moments like the mourning of former-president L la wife. This class presents conflicts from an interpersonal angle, emphasizing that opponents are human beings, whatever the political differences. It is a call from the traditional media to abandon the conflictual stance between groups in times of crisis, and to focus on the interpersonal aspects.

B a ilian political polarization has thus moved into dangerous territory, treading on the emotional rules relating to death (mourning and compassion). This is dangerous ground not only because it ignores one of the fundamental moral dogmas of our society, but also because, by touching on such a delicate subject, it has the potential to exacerbate moral indignation and the stereotyping of political opponents, raising people dehumanization and resentment to hitherto unseen levels. Denying a person compassion when a member of their family dies is a serious indication that the person is not acknowledged as human, but only envisaged as e il (Text 43, researcher/professor, February 2017, Estado de S. Paulo).

The author of the above text could not be accused of taking sides, however, becausehe also mentions how the situation was to mobilize L la political supporters against his opponent:

(...) The political conflict on emotions neither stopped at this point, nor on one side, however. L la supporters exploited people indignation over his political opponen disregard for the emotional rule as a way to accuse them, sensitize people, and mobilize combativeness ( ) Class 3 addresses the phenomenon of violence and political polarization, anchoring and objectifying this violence through the confrontation between Brazilian political groups.

Righ -wingers for the sake of convenience and staunch right-wingers are jumbled together and weaken the right. (...) The problem of the right has always been, and continues to be that it fights the left as if the left were the devil, the cause of all evils in the world. Right-wingers see the left as a monolithic block to be attacked head on, without drawing any clear di inc ion (Text 60, journalist, November 2015; Estado de S. Paulo).

The texts in Class 3 also analyze the role of the Internet as a vehicle for disseminating political polarization.

A psychologist has written that the people who are most aggressive on the internet are helpless and frustrated: their sense of impotence and frustration makes them need to impose on other people. This is how the American psychologist Pamela Rutledge ( ) judges the aggressiveness of many social media commentators in times of political polarization in B a il (Text 71, researcher/professor, September 2015, Folha de S. Paulo).

Content analysis

The distribution of the articles remained relatively stable over time, peaking steeply during the run-up to the elections (second semester of 2018), with 25 articles published in 2018, and 20 in 2019. Off 82 articles, 57 were published in the Folha de S. Paulo, and 25 in the Estado de S. Paulo. The articles included 68 long texts and 14 short notes (less than 10 lines). In both papers, the texts were written mainly by experts/researchers on political sociology, politics and other social sciences (33), and journalists (31). They all strongly condemned violence and political extremism, using various arguments.

Table 1 shows that 28 articles used balanced arguments to discuss political polarization.

In other words, these articles addressed the subject, criticized violence, and held both sides Our analysis shows that the two newspapers were strongly critical regarding B a il political polarization, and the one-sided arguments are higher in Folha de S. Paulo than in Estado de S. Paulo. Both newspapers, and the Folha de S. Paulo in particular, criticized

Bol ona o hate speech. They gave more space to voices against polarization, and especially against the violence of Bol ona o followers -though they also mentioned the acts of violence provoked by political agents linked to left-wing parties (mainly in texts written in 2015, when the PT was still in power). As a rule, the arguments in the two dailies were in favor of respect for differences, human rights and democracy.

Discussion

The present investigation explored how the traditional media in Brazil present and use arguments to shape the phenomenon of intense political polarization the country has been experiencing in recent times. According to [START_REF] Thompson | A mídia e a modernidade -uma teoria social da mídia[END_REF], analyses of the type conducted here are relevant because we live in a society where, although it is not always apparent, the media have an important role in our lives. They affect our daily conversations and sometimes influence our choices. The socio-cultural context also has a strong effect on the way the same event is represented by the media in different countries (Caillaud, Flick & Kalampalikis, 2012).

The texts identified in the traditional media reflected on how B a il political polarization in recent times is anchored and objectified through episodes of violence. They document situations in which different political groups engaged in acts of verbal and psychological violence between 2015 and 2017, and even in murder in 2018. The situation was especially bad in the months of the presidential election campaign, when Brazilian political polarization reached a peak, and when most of the texts examined were published.

DHA divided the texts into four categories. The first contains texts reporting the facts about the acts of aggression perpetrated and suffered during the period examined, revealing B a il profound political polarization associated with the figures of Bolsonaro and Lula, but mainly with the former, and his hate speech (Class 4). Several texts also criticized former President Dilma Rousseff, especially among those published in 2015 during her administration, but because most of the texts analyzed were published in 2018, those criticizing Bolsonaro and Lula, who were important figures at the time, were much more numerous.

When SRs enter the social and psychological domain, people tend to take a stance and customize them (Jaspal & Nerlich, 2017). Moscovici and Hewstone (1983) depending on which side we support [START_REF] Moscovici | Notes towards a description of a social representation[END_REF]. Some issues have been politicized in Brazil due to the stance taken by certain politicians and their supporters.

Two important premises to bear in mind when studying politics through the lens of SRs are that such representations are a form of shared knowledge, and that collective experience contributes towards the construction of social behavior. Another premise is that when new phenomena emerge, they are foregrounded on already known phenomena (Moscovici, 2008).

So, when Brazilians hear a presidential candidate using an aggressive discourse against minority groups, his political opponents compare him and his team rhetorically and aesthetically with Adolf Hitler (the same happened with Saddam Hussein, for instance), as [START_REF] Herrera | Making sides and taking sides: An analysis of salient images and category constructions for pro-and anti-Gulf war respondents[END_REF] pointed out.

The two, interconnected classes identified by the DHA relate to intergroup relations.

One of them (Class 2) is characterized by the confrontation between groups on the right and left, or between left-wing women and right-wing men. The other (Class 1) concerns an interpersonal rather than intergroup level, also when considering relations between politicians with opposing views, with texts insisting on the need for compassion and respect for an opponen bereavement, and focusing on personal emotions.

The fourth class includes texts that explicitly analyze the role of online communications and social networks as a vector for political polarization. There has been a growing involvement of mass communication and the media in various political arenas. The exchange between the media and politics is important in political pa ie public relations, marketing techniques and advertising, in campaigns and administrations. This also regards the role of journalists as reporters, interpreters, commentators and agenda-makers, as their relationship of mutual dependence with politicians shapes the behavior and professional practices of both groups (MacNair, 2017).

As our content analysis showed, the texts retrieved tended to show respect for political opponents, ci i en human rights, and a clean and fair democratic game. It is important to emphasize that this applied to the texts of both the newspapers examined, although they have historically taken opposing political stances. The differences between the two ne pape approaches related to the way their arguments were presented: the Folha de S. Paulo allocated some journalistic space for women politicians from left-wing parties to write about gendered political violence, and published more texts that took sides, while the arguments in the texts in the Estado de S. Paulo were more balanced. We also noticed that the Folha de São Paulo published a much larger number of texts on the subject, which may signal a greater concern with the issue.

On the other hand, presenting events in a neutral tone, reporting the news with little comment and without taking a stance, could pose a risk of legitimizing political polarization and violence. By describing events and news simply as the a e of affai , the press could facilitate the an fo ma ion of ideas into hing highlighted by reference theory, thereby limiting its role as a mechanism for promoting reflection). This brings to mind the ideas advanced by [START_REF] Mazzara | Le rappresentazioni sociali dell economia nel discorso dei media[END_REF] regarding the role of the press in the communication of political and economic choices, in contrast with constitutional dictates. The authors emphasized the need for journalistic communication to set aside a generalized trend to offer generic assurances and to refer too easily to an equally generic and undefined fear. The historic challenges facing Brazil (and other countries) today therefore cannot be met without an increase in ci i en democratic awareness.

Furthermore, it is necessary to say that Brazil is a country where there are several types of violence, nonetheless, the naturalization of the violence stemming from a violent colonization process marked by the genocide of native peoples, adds to this situation [START_REF] Gomes | Como lidar com os efeitos psicossociais da violência? O curso de capacitação como um dispositivo clínico e político[END_REF]. Despite this origin, the myth of the non-violent Brazilian circulates to this day, naturalizing violence not to question it [START_REF] Chauí | O que é democracia?[END_REF]. The state violence against black people [START_REF] Vitali | #BlackLivesMatter: A study of social representations from Twitter[END_REF] is an example of the violence practiced daily against a social group in the country.

Political polarization is yet another psychosocial process that can inflate the forms of violence that already exist in the country. It is possible to say that political polarization added to the danger of fake news (Sousa Júnior et al. 2020) ends up deteriorating intergroup relations, and is therefore harmful to society. This was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, whose polarized institutional discourses in several countries (de Rosa et al 2021), informational polarization [START_REF] Justo | Communication, social representations and prevention-information polarization on COVID-19 in Brazil[END_REF] and political belonging mainly influenced right-wing groups in disbelief about the lethality of the disease and non-adherence to hygiene and isolation measures recommended by health authorities [START_REF] Giacomozzi | COVID-19 and Elderly Females -a Study of Social Representations in Brazil[END_REF]Rozendo, et al, 2022).

Final considerations

Of course, no analysis on articles published in the press will be able to account for all the variety of opinions and arguments on the topic of political polarization in a given community or country. It nonetheless seemed worthwhile to examine how two important voices of the Brazilian national press ga e i ibili to this phenomenon and the arguments they put forward to explain it.

A limitation of the present study lies in the small number of texts identified on the topic being analyzed. Further studies on the subject perhaps analyzing the comments of the readers in the social networks of the newspapers or with other methodologies could contribute towards the identification of potential pa h a to a change in a co n political polarization on both the individual and the social levels.

  In the first partition, the corpus was divided into two sub-corpora: A was named Emotions x Rules of Democracy (Classes 2, 1 and 3); and B was named Political Violence, meaning episodes of physical or verbal violence, according to the texts, on the part of the presidential candidate Bolsonaro (Class 4). The second partition differentiated between classes 2 and 1, which respectively indicate a relationship between an intergroup end (Class 2) and an interpersonal end (Class 1) of Class 3 in other words, with the Internet as an important vehicle for political polarization and political violence. The dendrogram shows the distribution of the classes with details of their content. Class 4 is opposed to all the other classes. It was associated with texts written in 2018 and 2019, by journalists or unnamed authors, and published in the Folha de S. Paulo. This class reveals how political polarization peaked in Brazil during 2018 and 2019, mainly personified by Bolsonaro, and anchoring and objectifying this violence through several episodes of violence and politically-motivated deaths in Brazil. ( ) the capoeira teacher Moa do Katendê ( ) was murdered, stabbed 12 times by a Bolsonaro supporter with whom he had an argument in a bar after the results of the first round of voting were published (Text 26, written by a journalist, October, 2018, Folha de S. Paulo).

()

  Despite the fashion for describing ourselves as a peaceful people, Brazil has a violent streak. Violence is everywhere and cannot be absent from politics. It emerges in several ways.The mild ones are symbolic: Bolsonaro with Hi le moustache, Temer dressed as a vampire, Lula as Pixuleco. Many are more serious. Some people at a cancelled protest in Medianeira had brought dung to throw at opponents. Others near them were more successful throwing eggs, and some resorted to whipping, stoning and shooting. When bullets hit Ma ielle car and L la bus, even Temer was outraged ( ) . (Text 33, professor/researcher, April 2018, Folha de S.Paulo).Class 2 contains 339 TSs (17.77% of the corpus) and is associated with authors involved in politics. Class 2, Democ ac and Human Righ , is related to Class 1 as it includes texts condemning political polarization and fearing serious damage to democracy. Several texts were written by women politicians from left-wing parties, and one was written by a representative of an NGO against gender violence on women in B a il political world. She draws attention to the need to respect human rights in a democratic society. Political violence is presented as a confrontation between groups (men versus women; left versus right, etc.) using a defensive rhetoric that legitimizes the position of the ingroup (women) and delegitimizes the practices of the outgroup (mainly sexist, prejudiced and violent men against women in politics). ( ) no political disagreement or protest justifies the trivialization of gender violence, a patriarchal and misogynistic practice that shatters human dignity (...) UN Women follows the Brazilian political context with great concern, and publicly calls for protection for the democratic state and rule of law. UN Women addresses Brazilian society and calls for serenity in demonstrations and non-violence in the public debates essential to a democratic management of the co n political decisions ( ) (Text 19, journalist; March 2016, Folha de S. Paulo).

  involved in the conflict accountable, without identifying culprits on one or other side of the political spectrum. Another 28 articles criticized political violence by pointing a finger at one side of the political spectrum, with 19 articles openly criticizing Bolsonaro for his hate speech, and as an instigator of violent acts. Another two articles criticized the politicians Dilma and Lula. The others were broadly critical of the right or the left, without citing specific poli ician names. Finally, 26 articles addressed historical aspects of political violence, critically analyzing it in context. These articles were classified as neutral as regards the issues debated in the present; they sought explanations without pointing at any c lp i in the political arena.Most of the publications in the Folha de S. Paulo were articles that took sides, whilst the Estado de S. Paulo concentrated more on articles taking a balanced stance on the facts. As for the authors, both newspapers gave much the same space to texts authored by researchers and by journalists. The only difference was a space made available to politicians in the Folha de S. Paulo for texts written by women on gendered political polarization and violence. Three of the four texts were written by women politicians from left-wing parties, and one was written by the president (a woman) of an NGO concerned with women.Media productions on political polarization in Brazil are complex and illustrate B a il current situation with in-depth analyses of the facts, contextualizing them historically and socially.

  identified three subprocesses associated with objectification, namely: embodiment of knowledge, figuration and ontologization. The embodiment of knowledge connects the abstract object of social representation, identity and socio-psychological action to a person or group, lending the object a greater consistency through such association. It is worth mentioning that, within the polarized Brazil, Bolsonaro personifies the right, and Lula the left. The role of these two political actors was quite important during the years under analyses. Political leade points of view are important because they may shape representational systems that contribute to creating social realities that serve their interests, or their worldviews. Social representations do not develop spontaneously. People see the world in a particular way if they are constantly exposed to certain points of view, validated by the groups to which they belong. That is why political leaders who target certain social groups with aggressive words may encourage acts of violence against the groups concerned.In developing our SRs, what we think about an object is not enough. We are also influenced by what we think other people think. Meta-knowledge is important to understanding SRs because we respond differently to what others think and do. If people who side with the right or left, or political leaders adopt a certain type of behavior, we tend to react differently,

Table 1 . Analysis of categories

 1

	Folha	Estado	Total


Hans-Christoph Nuerk
email: hcnuerk@post.klinikum.rwth-aachen.de

Arnaud Rey

Ralf Graf

Arthur M Jacobs

Seidenberg

Patterson

; Jacobs

Rey

Ziegler

Grainger

See Coltheart

Curtis

Phonographic sublexical units in visual word recognition

assume that sublexical orthographic-phonological information is organized according to an onset-nucleus-coda scheme (Plaut, McClelland,

Introduction

Orthographic and phonological information has been shown to be strongly interdependent in visual word recognition [START_REF] Stone | Perception is a two-way street: Feedforward and feedback phonology in visual word recognition[END_REF][START_REF] Van Orden | Interdependence of form and function in cognitive systems explains perception of printed words[END_REF][START_REF] Ziegler | The feedback consistency effect in lexical decision and naming[END_REF][START_REF] Ziegler | Phonology can help or hurt the perception of print[END_REF]. Evidence for bi-directional orthographic-phonological influences comes from a variety of empirical phenomena, such as the pseudohomophone effect (e.g. [START_REF] Coltheart | Access to the internal lexicon[END_REF]1978;Rubenstein, Lewis, & Rubinstein, 1971;Seidenberg, Peterson, McDonald, & Plaut, 1996;[START_REF] Ziegler | Phonology can help or hurt the perception of print[END_REF], the bi-directional consistency effect [START_REF] Jared | Spelling-sound consistency affects the naming of high-frequency words[END_REF][START_REF] Jared | The basis of consistency effects in word naming[END_REF][START_REF] Stone | Perception is a two-way street: Feedforward and feedback phonology in visual word recognition[END_REF]Treiman, Mullenix, Bijeljac-Bibac, & Richmond-Welty, 1995;[START_REF] Ziegler | The feedback consistency effect in lexical decision and naming[END_REF] or the multi-letter grapheme effect [START_REF] Rastle | Whammy and double whammy: Length effects in nonword naming[END_REF][START_REF] Rey | A Phoneme effect in visual word recognition[END_REF]. In recent years, when the interdependency of orthography and phonology became practically undisputed, different research groups have built connectionist word recognition models that include both, orthographic and phonological coding, such as the DRC [START_REF] Coltheart | Dual-route and parallel-distributed processing approaches[END_REF][START_REF] Coltheart | Serial processing in reading aloud: Evidence for dual-route models of reading[END_REF], the PDP-model of [START_REF] Plaut | Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains[END_REF], and the MROM-p [START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF]. These models postulate different levels of orthography and phonology and in their connection weights they quantify the functional interdependence of orthography and phonology.

Inspired by these models, we propose and test a new hypothetical answer to an old question in the domain of visual word recognition. The question is: Which are the sublexical orthographic units that mediate visual word recognition and what measure indexes those units best? A number of such sublexical units have been proposed, such as bigrams, trigrams, or the letters themselves, and measures have been derived from those assumptions such as bigram frequency, trigram frequency, or positional letter frequency (e.g. [START_REF] Biederman | Supplementary report: The recognition of tachistoscopically presented fiveletter-words as a function of digram frequency[END_REF][START_REF] Gernsbacher | Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy[END_REF][START_REF] Grainger | Masked partial-word priming in visual word recognition: effects of positional letter frequency[END_REF][START_REF] Humphreys | Orthographic processing in visual word identification[END_REF][START_REF] Massaro | Visual, orthographic, phonological and lexical influences in reading[END_REF][START_REF] Seidenberg | A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming[END_REF]. However, we believe that these measures and units fall short in one important aspect of current theories and models of visual word recognition: they are purely orthographic measures and, thus, neglect the demonstrated role of phonological processes in visual word recognition. As an answer to the question about how to index sublexical units best we propose a measure that relies on units that play a functional role in the mapping from orthography to phonology in at least two of the recent connectionist models of visual word recognition. Both, the MROM-p [START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF] and the PDP-model of [START_REF] Plaut | Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains[END_REF] Phonographic Sublexical Units 3 use the subsyllabic onset-nucleus-coda scheme to organize the mapping from orthography to phonology in monosyllabic words. Based on these three functional subsyllabic components we propose and test a new measure that indexes a sublexical structure that mediates visual word recognition: Subcomponent Frequency (SCF).

Definition: Subcomponent Frequency is defined as the mean of the logarithms of orthographic onset, nucleus, and coda frequency. Orthographic onset frequency of a target word is calculated as the summed frequency of all monosyllabic words that share the same onset. Orthographic nucleus and coda frequency of a target word are calculated as the summed frequencies of all monosyllabic words that share the same orthographic nucleus or coda, respectively. Thus, SCF represents a phonographic measure [START_REF] Peereman | Orthographic and phonological neighborhood in naming: Not all neighbors are equally influential in orthographic space[END_REF]. It is phonologybased, as the segmentation of the syllable into onset, nucleus, coda relies on phonological properties of the language. It is orthographic, as its calculation is based on the orthographic units that correspond to phonological onset, nucleus and coda. Like for bigram frequency, cumulated frequencies of words that share the same sublexical orthographic units, are computed. However, the difference to bigram frequency is that these orthographic units are not constructed independent of phonology but rather defined by the structure of phonological subsyllabic units.

Predicted Subcomponent Frequency Effects:

This study investigates the question whether SCF indexes sublexical processing during visual word recognition. If subsyllabic components are critical reading units by which word recognition is mediated, then high-SCF should facilitate word recognition. However, sublexical phonologicalorthographic effects such as consistency effects [START_REF] Andrews | Phonological recoding: Is the regularity effect consistent?[END_REF][START_REF] Backman | Acquisition and use of spelling sound information in reading[END_REF][START_REF] Seidenberg | When does irregular spelling or pronunciation influence word recognition?[END_REF], homophone errors in semantic decision tasks [START_REF] Jared | Does word identification proceed from spelling to sound to meaning[END_REF], multi-letter grapheme effects [START_REF] Rey | A Phoneme effect in visual word recognition[END_REF] or body neighbor effects [START_REF] Ziegler | No more problems in Coltheart's neighborhood: resolving neighborhood conflicts in a lexical decision task[END_REF] are mostly observed for low-frequency words only (but see [START_REF] Jared | Spelling-sound consistency affects the naming of high-frequency words[END_REF]. Recognition of high-frequency words may be mainly and rapidly performed on the basis of a lexical procedure and may be less affected by a slower sublexical processing involving the conversion of sublexical orthographic units into sublexical phonological units (e.g. [START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF][START_REF] Coltheart | Dual-route and parallel-distributed processing approaches[END_REF]. Therefore, we expect a facilitating SCF effect for low-frequency words but no such effect or at least a minor effect for high-frequency words.

Testing the effects of one sublexical measure and claiming that the observed effects are due to this particular sublexical measure is problematic since, by definition, most sublexical measures are highly correlated. While controlling for other established measures of visual word recognition like frequency, neighborhood and consistency, it is virtually impossible to separate SCF and bigram frequency (BF) for words. However, the measures can be disentangled for nonwords, and then be tested against each other. As BF is probably the most prominent, yet purely orthographic, sublexical measure we tested SCF while holding BF constant for nonwords. Only if SCF effects still prevail when BF is controlled, we can consider the SCF measure as a promising index for sublexical processing in visual word recognition.

For SCF, the hypotheses for nonwords are straightforward. If SCF is a relevant index for sublexical processing, then high-SCF nonwords should be more similar to words in the lexicon as they more frequently share sublexical components. Thus, high-SCF nonwords should be harder to distinguish from words in a lexical decision task than low-SCF nonwords. Similarly, if BF is a relevant index for sublexical processing then, high-BF nonwords should be harder to distinguish from words than low-BF nonwords.

Method

Participants Forty psychology students of the Philipps-University Marburg participated in the experiment. All were native German speakers and had normal or corrected to normal vision. They received course credit for participation in the experiment.

Stimuli and Design 80 monosyllabic German 5-letter words and 80 monosyllabic 5-letter nonwords were used in the experiment. Frequency and the reference lists for computation of all other measures were taken from the CELEX-Database [START_REF] Baayen | The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM)[END_REF]. For words, frequency and SCF were manipulated in 2*2 within-subject design, leading to 4 groups of 20 words each (see Table 1). Lowfrequency item groups included only words with 10 or less occurrences per million while high frequency item groups consisted of words with more than 20 occurrences per million. Each frequency group was composed of one low-SCF and one high-SCF group, where all high-SCF words had higher Phonographic Sublexical Units 5 subcomponent frequencies than all low-SCF words. Frequency was matched between the respective SCF groups and SCF was matched between the respective frequency groups as closely as possible.

Additionally, the number of orthographic neighbors (N) was matched between stimulus groups. Furthermore, mean type and token consistency and H-consistency were calculated by generalizing the measure proposed by [START_REF] Treiman | The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography[END_REF] on all monosyllabic words (for exact definition of these consistency measures see [START_REF] Treiman | The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography[END_REF]. In the very same way these authors calculated type and token consistency for C 1 VC 2 words we computed type and token consistency for all monosyllabic onset-nucleus-coda words. All consistency measures were matched between the item groups as closely as possible (for all stimulus characteristics again see Table 1).

< insert Table 1 about here > Unfortunately, when frequency, SCF, N, mean type and token consistency, and H-type and H-token consistency are matched between the word stimulus groups it is impossible to hold BF constant between these groups. It generally varies with SCF. However, SCF and BF can be disentangled for nonwords. Nonwords were created by combining existing subcomponents. In a 2*2 design, SCF and BF were manipulated, while N and H-consistency were matched as closely as possible between the item groups. Consistency was generally high and comparable to words (see Table 1).

Procedure

The experiment was run on an Apple Power PC 7200/90. Subjects sat approximately 50 cm from the screen. A trial began with a fixation colon in the middle of the screen. After 500 ms the colon disappeared and a stimulus was presented in Courier 24 font. The stimulus remained visible until subjects pressed one of two keys indicating whether the stimulus was a word or a nonword. After an interstimulus interval of 500 ms the next trial began. Subjects received 16 training trials prior to the randomized 160 experimental trials. Subjects were instructed to respond as quickly and accurately as possible. Responses slower than 2000 ms were not recorded. The whole experiment took about 20 minutes.

Phonographic Sublexical Units 6

Results

Items with overall accuracy below .67 were eliminated, i.e. responses to each item had to be correct at least twice as often as incorrect. This elimination affected only low-frequency words, but no highfrequency words and no nonwords. Three low-frequency words of the high-SCF item pool and four of the low-SCF item pool were excluded. On the basis of this item pool mean correct response times and error rates were computed and are shown in Table 2. The trimming procedure excluded scores smaller than 200 ms and greater than 3 SDs above the participant's overall response time. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) for a general overview and t-tests for a direct test of the predicted SCF effects for each word and nonword group were separately conducted using both participants (F 1 and t 1 ) and items (F 2 and t 2 ) as random factors.

< insert Table 2 about here >

Words:

High-SCF seems to improve performance for low-frequency words, but not for high-frequency words (see Table 2). Overall ANOVAs for words reveal a frequency effect in all analyses (for RT F 1 (1, 39) = 46.48, p < .001; F 2 (1, 69) = 10.31, p < .01; for accuracy F 1 (1, 39) = 21.90, p < .001; F 2 (1, 69) = 8.74, p < .01) and an overall SCF effect in most analyses (for RT F 1 (1, 39) = 9.17, p < .01; F 2 (1, 69) = 1.86, p = .18; for accuracy F 1 (1, 39) = 8.21, p < .01; F 2 (1, 69) = 5.45, p < .05) even though no indication of an SCF-effect was observed in any analysis for high-SCF words. Consequently, an interaction or trend towards an interaction can be observed for most analyses (for RT F 1 (1, 39) = 4.68, p < .05; F 2 (1, 69) = 1.23, p = .27; for accuracy F 1 (1, 39) = 13.71, p < .001; F 2 (1, 69) = 5.45, p =.08). Direct tests of the SCF-hypotheses with t-tests confirm these results: For low-frequency words, high-SCF tends to produce faster (t 1 (39)= 3.44, p < .001; t 2 (31)= 1.48, p = .07) and more accurate (t 1 (39)= 3.89, p < .001; t 2 (31)= 2.37, p = .01) responses than low-SCF. In contrast, for high-frequency words no effect is observed in any RT or accuracy analyses (all t<1).

Altogether, the results are straightforward: SCF tends to affect RT and accuracy performance for low frequency words but not for high frequency words.

Nonwords

ANOVAs for nonwords reveal a clear SCF effect, that prevails when BF is held constant. In contrast there is no hint of a BF effect when SCF is held constant. While all ANOVAs produce a clear main Phonographic Sublexical Units 7 SCF effect in all analyses (for RT F 1 (1, 39) = 92.64, p < .001; F 2 (1, 76) = 23.34, p < .001; for accuracy F 1 (1, 39) = 26.81, p < .001; F 2 (1, 76) = 16.39, p < .001), no indication of a BF effect can be observed in any analysis (all F <1 for main effects and interactions). Direct testing of the SCFhypotheses with t-tests confirm these results for both BF groups (see Table 2). High-SCF nonwords are harder to distinguish from words than low-SCF nonwords as they produce slower and less accurate responses in high-BF nonwords (for RT t 1 (39)= 7.41, p < .001; t 2 (38)= 3.59, p < .001; for accuracy t 1 (39)= 3.87, p < .001; t 2 (38)= 2.82, p < .01) as well as in low-BF nonwords (for RT t 1 (39)= 7.24, p < .001; t 2 (38)= 3.75, p < .001; for accuracy t 1 (39)= 4.05, p < .001; t 2 (38)= 2.95, p < .01).

Again, the results are straightforward: Nonwords with subcomponents that are frequent in the language are much harder to distinguish from words than nonwords with infrequent subcomponents.

In contrast, BF does not appear to affect nonword performance in our study. When SCF is controlled, nonwords with high-frequent bigrams are no harder to distinguish from words than nonwords with low-frequent bigrams.

Discussion

The result of this study suggests that using phonological-orthographic coupling for a new phonographic sublexical measure SCF may eventually produce a promising index of sublexical processing in visual word recognition. For nonwords, SCF seems to be an even more promising index of sublexical processing than BF as the SCF effect prevails when BF is held constant, but not vice versa. Thus, the confound with the most prominent other sublexical measure BF cannot explain the SCF effect obtained in this study 1 . Other alternative explanations of the SCF effect can also be excluded. For example neighborhood is naturally correlated with SCF, as mostly orthographic neighbors share two of three subcomponents. As N was controlled, this confound does not account of the results. Similarly, alternative explanations based on possible confounds of SCF with HFN, subcomponent consistency can also be excluded in the present study. Although not all possible alternative explanations can be excluded in one experiment (e.g. Ziegler, Rey, & Jacobs, 1998), we believe that many of the most established alternative explanations (BF, N, HFN, consistency) cannot explain the SCF effect in this study. Therefore, the SCF effect obtained here, for both, nonwords and in most analyses for words, provides additional evidence for the hypothesis that the onset-nucleuscoda organization of the syllable plays a functional role in visual word recognition as proposed by Phonographic Sublexical Units 8 recent computational models (e.g. [START_REF] Plaut | Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains[END_REF][START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF]. In accordance with the MROM-p and the DRC [START_REF] Coltheart | Dual-route and parallel-distributed processing approaches[END_REF][START_REF] Coltheart | Serial processing in reading aloud: Evidence for dual-route models of reading[END_REF] is the fact that highfrequency words are not sensitive to SCF, because their recognition might be mainly and rapidly performed on the basis of a lexical procedure and their recognition does less rely on sublexical orthography-to-phonology translation. Nonwords with high-SCF are harder to reject in a lexical decision task. This is consistent with the view that they produce more orthographic and phonological lexical activation than low-SCF words, making it harder to distinguish high-SCF nonwords from words (c.f. [START_REF] Grainger | Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: A multiple read-out model[END_REF][START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF]. In contrast, a purely orthographic BF measure did not have any effect on response performance for nonwords, when SCF was controlled.

As the importance of interdependency of orthographic and phonological information in visual word recognition has often been established in recent years [START_REF] Stone | Perception is a two-way street: Feedforward and feedback phonology in visual word recognition[END_REF][START_REF] Van Orden | Interdependence of form and function in cognitive systems explains perception of printed words[END_REF]Ziegler et al., 1997;[START_REF] Jared | Spelling-sound consistency affects the naming of high-frequency words[END_REF][START_REF] Jared | The basis of consistency effects in word naming[END_REF][START_REF] Treiman | The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography[END_REF][START_REF] Peereman | Orthographic and phonological neighborhood in naming: Not all neighbors are equally influential in orthographic space[END_REF][START_REF] Rey | A Phoneme effect in visual word recognition[END_REF], we suggest that any index of sublexical processing should also take this interdependency into account and should not purely rely on orthography. The SCF measure presents an alternative for monosyllabic words that acknowledges the importance of phonological processing in visual word recognition.

Although SCF seems to be a promising new index for sublexical processing, some issues need to be discussed for future research. First, it seems that the issue of phonographic reading units is a language-specific issue and that it strongly depends on the relation between orthography and phonology in each language. Two recent translingual studies illustrate this point showing that both, German developing readers and developmental dyslexics had less problems in reading non-words than paralleled English children [START_REF] Landerl | The impact of orthographic consistency on dyslexia: A German-English comparison[END_REF][START_REF] Wimmer | The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children[END_REF]).

These results indicate that German young readers probably use a smaller unit-sized orthography-tophonology mapping. Therefore, it seems not unlikely that unit-size of subsyllabic components skilled adult readers use to mediate reading does differ between languages (e.g., [START_REF] Rey | A Phoneme effect in visual word recognition[END_REF].

Second, we tested in this study the psychological validity of onset, nucleus, and coda units following recent models of visual word recognition [START_REF] Jacobs | MROM-P: An interactive activation, multiple read-out model of orthographic and phonological processes in visual word recognition[END_REF][START_REF] Plaut | Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains[END_REF]. However, Phonographic Sublexical Units 9 other partitions have been proposed. Some of them favor an onset-rime partition, where nucleus and coda are not separated [START_REF] Zorzi | Two routes or one in reading aloud: A connectionist dual-process model[END_REF]. Others do assume a segmentation based on single graphemes [START_REF] Coltheart | Dual-route and parallel-distributed processing approaches[END_REF][START_REF] Rastle | Lexical and nonlexical priming in reading aloud[END_REF]. These alternative segmentations provide therefore additional phonographic hypotheses. As SCF is naturally confounded with onset-rime frequency or grapheme frequency, future studies should disentangle these alternative account of SCF to investigate if the frequency of larger phonographic units (onsetrime), or the frequency of smaller units (graphemes) could account for the SCF effect. However, the main purpose of this study was to generally establish the idea that the frequency of phonographic subsyllabic units of visual word recognition plays an important role in visual word recognition.

Future research may investigate the size and levels at which frequency of sublexical phonographic units determine visual word recognition.

In sum, the phonology-based orthographic (i.e. phonographic) sublexical measure SCF seems to be a promising and easily computable index of sublexical processing whose translingual unit-size validity seems worth being tested further. Conceptually, it provides additional evidence for the coupling of orthographic and phonological codes during reading. Footnote 1. One group of nonwords (high SCF/ low BF) seems to be very homogenous in that they have either of two bigrams in common -IE or ZW. This is due to the fact that it is very hard to construct nonwords in the mixed (high SCF/ low BF, and low SCF/ high BF) groups, particularly in the high SCF/ low BF group. Hence, one could argue that the SCF effect may be due to properties of these particular bigrams that are irrespective of bigram frequency, for example visual properties. While this argument explains perfectly for the SCF effect in the low BF group, it does not hold for the SCF effect in the high BF group. The bigrams used there are quite different and more heterogeneous, but still we find an SCF effect. This suggests that it is rather unlikely that the SCF effect in general can be explained by the visual properties of these particular bigrams, but leaves the question open whether different interactions with respect to that specific group of nonwords could be produced in other experiments. We thank Glyn Humphreys for putting our attention on this alternative account for the performance with stimuli of the high-SCF/ low-BF nonword group. Germany. E-Mail may be sent to Hans-Christoph Nuerk (hcnuerk@post.klinikum.rwth-aachen.de).

Phonographic

Phonographic Sublexical Units

  Sublexical Units 15 Authors' notes This research was supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to Arthur M. Jacobs supporting Ralf Graf and Hans-Christoph Nuerk (Teilprojekte 7 und 8 der Forschergruppe: Dynamik kognitiver Repräsentationen), and by grants from the Fyssen Foundation and the French Ministry of Education and Research (#95124, programme Sciences Cognitives) to Arnaud Rey. We thank Katja Oßwald, Kai Richter and Siegfried Gauggel for their precious help in the realization of this study. We also wish to thank Max Coltheart and Glyn Humphreys for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence should be addressed to Hans-Christoph Nuerk, who is now at the University Hospital of the RWTH Aachen, Department of Neurology -Section Neuropsychology, Pauwelsstr. 30, D-52057 Aachen,

Table 1 :

 1 16 Characteristic of Words and Nonwords: Means for Different Stimulus Groups

	WORDS	high Freq		low Freq
		high SCF	low SCF	high SCF	low SCF
	Log Frequency	1.88	1.91	0.60	0.50
	SCF	4.08	3.38	4.09	3.11
	N	1.40	1.20	1.75	1.60
	log BF	3.73	3.32	3.62	3.07
	Type Consistency	0.95	0.93	0.94	0.91
	Token Consistency	0.91	0.93	0.88	0.92
	H-Type Consistency 0.20	0.23	0.26	0.30
	H-Token Consistency 0.14	0.15	0.20	0.24
	NONWORDS	high BF		low BF
		high SCF	low SCF	high SCF	low SCF
	log BF	3.47	3.41	2.69	2.67
	SCF	4.18	2.73	4.06	2.76
	N	0.45	0.45	0.30	0.30
	H-Type Consistency 0.23	0.31	0.13	0.25
	H-Token Consistency 0.17	0.17	0.04	0.14

Table 2 :

 2 Mean Correct Response Times (RT) in ms and Percentage of Errors (%Err) with the Standard Errors in Brackets for Different Stimulus Groups Computed Over Subjects

	WORDS	high Freq		low Freq
		high SCF	low SCF	high SCF	low SCF
	Mean RT	566 (15)	570 (14)	587 (16)	610 (16)
	%Err	4.5 (1.0)	5.4 (1.3)	7.2 (1.2)	12.4 (1.9)
	NONWORDS	high BF		low BF
		high SCF	low SCF	high SCF	low SCF
	Mean RT	649 (17)	600 (16)	646 (17)	596 (16)
	%Err	5.2 (1.0)	1.0 (0.4)	5.4 (1.0)	1.7 (0.5)