An orthographic effect in phoneme processing, and its limitations.

Anne Cutler,Chris Davis

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00018

Abstract

In three phoneme goodness rating experiments, listeners heard phonetic tokens varying along a continuum centered on /s/, occurring finally in isolated word or non-word tokens. An effect of spelling appeared in Experiment 1: native English-speakers’ goodness ratings for the best /s/ tokens were significantly higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words spelled with C (e.g., voice). Since the tokens were in fact identical in each word, this effect indicates less than optimal evaluation performance. No spelling effect appeared when non-native speakers rated the same materials in Experiment 2, indicating that the observed difference could not be due to acoustic characteristics of the S- versus C-words. In Experiment 3, native English-speakers’ ratings for /s/ did not differ in non-words rhyming with words consistently spelled with S (e.g., pless) or with words consistently spelled with C (e.g., floice); i.e., no effects of lexical rhyme analogs appeared. It is concluded that the findings are better explained in terms of phonemic decisions drawing upon lexical information where convenient than by obligatory influence of lexical knowledge upon pre-lexical processing.

Highlights

Spoken-word recognition researchers agree that the identification of phonemes can be influenced by the lexical context in which they occur, but disagree about how this is to be explained
The 81-step continuum was divided into nine 9-step bins, and ANOVAs were conducted across participants with S/C spelling and bin as independent variables
The task of rating the goodness of non-standard phoneme realizations requires no recourse to higher-level information, but its www.frontiersin.org performance can be affected by orthographic knowledge when the phoneme realizations are embedded in real-word carriers

Summary

Introduction

Spoken-word recognition researchers agree that the identification of phonemes can be influenced by the lexical context in which they occur, but disagree about how this is to be explained. EXPERIMENTS Listeners performed goodness ratings on the final segment of real words or non-words.

Results

Conclusion