Abstract
While the influence of orthographic knowledge on lexical and postlexical speech processing tasks has been consistently observed, it is not the case in tasks that can be performed at the prelexical level. The present study re-examined the orthographic consistency effect in such a task, namely in shadowing. Comparing the situation where the acoustic signal was clearly presented to the situation where it was embedded in noise, we observed that the orthographic effect was restricted to the latter situation and only to high-frequency words. This finding supports the lexical account of the orthographic effects in speech recognition tasks and illustrates the ability of the cognitive system to adjust itself as a function of task difficulty by resorting to the appropriate processing mechanism and information in order to maintain a good level of performance.
Highlights
The most influential spoken word recognition models typically assumed that speech is processed without reference to its written code
Comparing the situation where the acoustic signal was clearly presented to the situation where it was embedded in noise, we observed that the orthographic effect was restricted to the latter situation and only to high-frequency words
This finding supports the lexical account of the orthographic effects in speech recognition tasks and illustrates the ability of the cognitive system to adjust itself as a function of task difficulty by resorting to the appropriate processing mechanism and information in order to maintain a good level of performance
Summary
The most influential spoken word recognition models typically assumed that speech is processed without reference to its written code. The Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson and Welsh, 1978; Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980) claims that the word-initial cohort is constructed from the phonological information contained in a spoken word. The absence of interaction between the phonological information contained in the speech input and the corresponding orthographic information is inherent to autonomous models such as RACE or MERGE (Cutler and Norris, 1979; Norris et al, 2000). The role of orthography is not mentioned either in a highly interactive model such as TRACE (Mcclelland and Elman, 1986), even though this could accommodate the impact of orthography on spoken word recognition by means of interactions between the representations activated at different levels (i.e., features, phonemes, and words)
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