Spelling-to-sound regularity affects pronunciation latency but not lexical decision

Abstract

A series of experiments are reported concerning the regularity effect in single- word pronunciation and lexical decision tasks. Experiment 1 compared pronunciation latencies for exception words based on unfamiliar letter patterns (e.g., YACHT) with exception words based on common letter patterns (e.g., PINT). It was found that both types of exceptions produced longer latencies than regular words. Experiment 2 employed a more objective basis for matching exception and regular words for letter pattern familiarity. Under these conditions exception words still produced significantly longer pronunciation latencies than regular words. These experiments show that previous demonstrations of the regularity effect in pronunciation cannot be attributed to uncontrolled visual differences between exception and regular words. Experiment 3 investigated whether the same material as Experiment 2 would produce a regularity effect in lexical decision but this was not found. Theoretical implications of these resuts and discrepancies with previous studies are discussed.