The locus of the orthographic consistency effect in auditory word recognition: Further evidence from French

Abstract

Ventura, Morais, Pattamadilok, and Kolinsky (2004) found, for spoken Portuguese words, an orthographic consistency effect in lexical decision but not in standard shadowing (on-line repetition): words ending with phonological rimes that have several spellings led to longer decision times than words ending with phonological rimes that have only one spelling. This pattern of results was replicated in this study, using French, a language presenting a much higher degree of orthographic inconsistency than Portuguese. The observation of systematic associations between the effects of word orthographic consistency, word frequency and lexicality supports the hypothesis that lexical processing is critical to the occurrence of the consistency effect. Finally, the comparison of the word consistency effects obtained in French and in Portuguese suggests that their size depends on the overall consistency of the language's orthographic code.