The influence of orthography on phonological representations in the lexicon

Abstract

A syllable monitoring task was used to examine the nature of the phonological representation of words in the lexicon. In the first experiment subjects tended to accept a match between the target syllable and the word when the vowel of the target syllable was of full value while the vowel of the word was a reduced vowel. Thus the reduced vowel was accepted as a full vowel as determined by the orthography of the word. The second experiment also provided evidence that the phonological representation involved in performing the task was orthographically influenced. The orthographic syllabic structure of the word appeared to have an effect on reaction times. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of phonological representation and the possible implications for the lexical representation of pronunciation and spelling.