The contribution of orthography to spoken word production: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

A recent debate in the language production literature concerns the influence of a word’s orthographic information on spoken word production and the extent to which this influence is modulated by task context. In the present study, Mandarin Chinese participants produced sets of words that shared orthography (O+P−), phonology (O−P+), or orthography and phonology (O+P+), or were unrelated (O−P−), in the context of a reading, associative naming, or picture naming task. Shared phonology yielded facilitation effects in all three tasks, but only in the reading task was this phonological effect modulated by shared orthography. Shared orthography by itself (O+P−) revealed inhibitory effects in reading, but not in associative naming or in picture naming. These results suggest that a word’s orthography information influences spoken word production only in tasks that rely heavily on orthographic information.     

Effects of Orthography on Speech Production in Chinese

The potential role of orthographic representations on spoken word production was investigated with speakers of Chinese, a non-alphabetic and orthographically non-transparent language. Using the response generation procedure, we obtained the well-known facilitation from word-initial phonological overlap, but this effect was unaffected by whether or not responses shared the initial character. In a study which manipulated the visual similarity of the word-initial character, a significant inhibitory effect of orthography was found. However, this effect disappeared when prompt stimuli were presented auditorily, suggesting that the orthographic effect might be attributable to the memorization stage of the response generation task, rather than reflecting processes genuine to speaking. By contrast, a reliable orthographic effect was found in an oral reading task, suggesting that orthography plays a role only when it is relevant to the word production task. Furthermore, the present findings show that the orthographic effect is tied to the correspondence between orthography and phonology of a language when orthography is relevant to the task used.     

Orthographic facilitation and phonological inhibition in spoken word recognition: A developmental study

We investigated the extent to which learning to read and write affects spoken word recognition. Previous studies have reported orthographic effects on spoken language in skilled readers. However, very few studies have addressed the development of these effects as a function of reading expertise. We therefore studied orthographic neighborhood (ON) and phonological neighborhood (PN) effects in spoken word recognition in beginning and advanced readers and in children with developmental dyslexia. We predicted that whereas both beginning and advanced readers would show normal PN effects, only advanced readers would show ON effects. The results confirmed these predictions. The size of the ON effect on spoken word recognition was strongly predicted by written language experience and proficiency. In contrast, the size of the PN effect was not affected by reading level. Moreover, dyslexic readers showed no orthographic effects on spoken word recognition. In sum, these data suggest that orthographic effects on spoken word recognition are not artifacts of some uncontrolled spoken language property but reflect a genuine influence of orthographic information on spoken word recognition.     

Long-term repetition priming in spoken and written word production: evidence for a contribution of phonology to handwriting

Although it is relatively well established that access to orthographic codes in production tasks is possible via an autonomous link between meaning and spelling (e.g., Rapp, Benzing, & Caramazza, 1997), the relative contribution of phonology to orthographic access remains unclear. Two experiments demonstrated persistent repetition priming in spoken and written single-word responses, respectively. Two further experiments showed priming from spoken to written responses and vice versa, which is interpreted as reflecting a role of phonology in constraining orthographic access. A final experiment showed priming from spoken onto written responses even when participants engaged in articulatory suppression during writing. Overall, the results support the view that access to orthography codes is accomplished via both the autonomous link between meaning and spelling and an indirect route via phonology.     

Visual phonology: The effects of orthographic consistency on different auditory word recognition tasks

In this study, we investigated orthographic influences on spoken word recognition. The degree of spelling inconsistency was manipulated while rime phonology was held constant. Inconsistent words with subdominant spellings were processed more slowly than inconsistent words with dominant spellings. This graded consistency effect was obtained in three experiments. However, the effect was strongest in lexical decision, intermediate in rime detection, and weakest in auditory naming. We conclude that (1) orthographic consistency effects are not artifacts of phonological, phonetic, or phonotactic properties of the stimulus material; (2) orthographic effects can be found even when the error rate is extremely low, which rules out the possibility that they result from strategies used to reduce task difficulty; and (3) orthographic effects are not restricted to lexical decision. However, they are stronger in lexical decision than in other tasks. Overall, the study shows that learning about orthography alters the way we process spoken language.     

Reading spoken words: orthographic effects in auditory priming

Three experiments examined the involvement of orthography in spoken word processing using a task - unimodal auditory priming with offset overlap - taken to reflect activation of prelexical representations. Two types of prime-target relationship were compared; both involved phonological overlap, but only one had a strong orthographic overlap (e.g., dream-gleam vs. scheme-gleam). In Experiment 1, which used lexical decision, phonological overlap facilitated target responses in comparison with an unrelated condition (e.g., stove-gleam). More importantly, facilitation was modulated by degree of orthographic overlap. Experiment 2 employed the same design as Experiment 1, but with a modified procedure aimed at eliciting swifter responses. Again, the phonological priming effect was sensitive to the degree of orthographic overlap between prime and target. Finally, to test whether this orthographic boost was caused by congruency between response type and valence of the prime-target overlap, Experiment 3 used a pseudoword detection task, in which participants responded "yes" to novel words and "no" to known words. Once again phonological priming was observed, with a significant boost in the orthographic overlap condition. These results indicate a surprising level of orthographic involvement in speech perception, and provide clear evidence for mandatory orthographic activation during spoken word recognition.     

Syllabic organization and deafness: Orthographic structure or letter frequency in reading?

For hearing people, structure given to orthographic information may be influenced by phonological structures that develop with experience of spoken language. In this study we examine whether profoundly deaf individuals structure orthographic representation differently. We ask "Would deaf students who are advanced readers show effects of syllable structure despite their altered experience of spoken language, or would they, because of reduced influence from speech, organize their orthographic knowledge according to groupings defined by letter frequency?" We used a task introduced by Prinzmetal (Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986) in which participants were asked to judge the colour of letters in briefly presented words. As with hearing participants, the number of errors made by deaf participants was influenced by syllable structure (Prinzmetal et al., 1986; Rapp, 1992). This effect could not be accounted for by letter frequency. Furthermore, there was no correlation between the strength of syllable effects and residual speech or hearing. Our results support the view that the syllable is a unit of linguistic organization that is abstract enough to apply to both spoken and written language.     

Examining the interactivity of lexical orthographic and phonological processing.

The number and type of connections involving different levels of orthographic and phonological representations differentiate between several models of spoken and visual word recognition. At the sublexical level of processing, Borowsky, Owen, and Fonos (1999) demonstrated evidence for direct processing connections from grapheme representations to phoneme representations (i.e., a sensitivity effect) over and above any bias effects, but not in the reverse direction. Neural network models of visual word recognition implement an orthography to phonology processing route that involves the same connections for processing sublexical and lexical information, and thus a similar pattern of cross-modal effects for lexical stimuli are expected by models that implement this single type of connection (i.e., orthographic lexical processing should directly affect phonological lexical processing, but not in the reverse direction). Furthermore, several models of spoken word perception predict that there should be no direct connections between orthographic representations and phonological representations, regardless of whether the connections are sublexical or lexical. The present experiments examined these predictions by measuring the influence of a cross-modal word context on word target discrimination. The results provide constraints on the types of connections that can exist between orthographic lexical representations and phonological lexical representations.     

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition: The consistency effect in semantic and gender categorization tasks

According to current models, spoken word recognition is driven by the phonological properties of the speech signal. However, several studies have suggested that orthographic information also influences recognition in adult listeners. In particular, it has been repeatedly shown that, in the lexical decision task, words that include rimes with inconsistent spellings (e.g., /-ip/ spelled -eap or -eep) are disadvantaged, as compared with words with consistent rime spelling. In the present study, we explored whether the orthographic consistency effect extends to tasks requiring people to process words beyond simple lexical access. Two different tasks were used: semantic and gender categorization. Both tasks produced reliable consistency effects. The data are discussed as suggesting that orthographic codes are activated during word recognition, or that the organization of phonological representations of words is affected by orthography during literacy acquisition.     

The Sound of Mute Vowels in Auditory Word-Stem Completion

Some studies have argued that orthography can influence speakers when they perform oral language tasks. Words containing a mute vowel provide well-suited stimuli to investigate this phenomenon because mute vowels, such as the second <e> in <vegetable>, are present orthographically but absent phonetically. Using an auditory word-stem completion task, we tested whether subjects were influenced by the presence of mute vowels. We ran experiments in two languages which contain numerous mute-vowel words: Tigrinya, which uses a syllabic/moraic writing system, and French, which uses an alphabetic writing system. We argue that Tigrinya and French speakers based their completion on the sound form of words, rather than the written one. We suggest that the presence of mute vowels at the underlying phonological level, rather than their orthographic representation, influences speakers in the word-stem completion task. Some effects previously attributed to orthography may instead be attributable to underlying phonological representations.     

The effect of deleting schwa (mute e) on spoken word recognition in French]

We studied the processing of two word strings in French made up of a determiner and a noun which contains a schwa (mute e). Depending on the noun, schwa deletion is present ("la tir'lire"), optional ("le ch(e)min") or absent ("la cornemuse"). In a production study, we show that schwa deletion, and the category of the noun, have a large impact on the duration of the strings. We take this into account in two perception studies, which use word repetition and lexical decision, and which show that words in which the schwa has been deleted usually take longer to recognize than words that retain the schwa, but that this depends also on the category of the word. We explain these results by examining the influence of orthography. Based on the model proposed by Grainger and Ferrand (1996), which integrates the written dimension, we suggest that two sources of information, phonological and orthographic, interact during spoken word recognition.     

Time course analyses of orthographic and phonological priming effects during word recognition in a transparent orthography

In opaque orthographies, the activation of orthographic and phonological codes follows distinct time courses during visual word recognition. However, it is unclear how orthography and phonology are accessed in more transparent orthographies. Therefore, we conducted time course analyses of masked priming effects in the transparent Dutch orthography. The first study used targets with small phonological differences between phonological and orthographic primes, which are typical in transparent orthographies. Results showed consistent orthographic priming effects, yet phonological priming effects were absent. The second study explicitly manipulated the strength of the phonological difference and revealed that both orthographic and phonological priming effects became identifiable when phonological differences were strong enough. This suggests that, similar to opaque orthographies, strong phonological differences are a prerequisite to separate orthographic and phonological priming effects in transparent orthographies. Orthographic and phonological priming appeared to follow distinct time courses, with orthographic codes being quickly translated into phonological codes and phonology dominating the remainder of the lexical access phase.     

Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Performance: A Cross Language Comparison

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of billinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and reading measures in three groups of first graders: monolingual Hebrew speakers, bilingual Russian–Hebrew speakers, and Arabic-speaking children. We found that language experience affects phonological awareness, as both Russian–Hebrew bilinguals and the Arabic speakers achieved higher scores on metalinguistic tests than Hebrew speakers. Orthography affected reading measures and their correlation with phonological abilitites. Children reading Hebrew showed better text reading ability and significant correlations between phonological awareness and reading scores. Children reading Arabic showed a slight advantage in single word and nonword reading over the two Hebrew reading groups, and very weak relationships between phonological abilities and reading performance. We conclude that native Arabic speakers have more difficulty in processing Arabic orthography than Hebrew monolinguals and bilinguals have in processing Hebrew orthography, and suggest that this is due to the additional visual complexity of Arabic orthography.     

Electronic mail,a new written‐language register: A study with French‐speaking adolescents

The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the linguistic forms used by adolescents in electronic mail (e‐mail) differ from those used in standard written language. The study was conducted in French, a language with a deep orthography that has strict, addressee‐dependent rules for using second person personal pronouns (unfamiliar and familiar forms). Data were collected from 80 adolescents ages 12 to 15 in a natural situation where they had to introduce themselves by e‐mail to two addressees (peer/teacher). Participants were divided into two groups (skilled/unskilled in computer‐mediated communication). Their emails contained a large number of orthographic deviations (the most frequent being neographic forms). Participants skilled in computer‐mediated communication (CMC) deviated more than unskilled ones did. The number of orthographic deviations was not linked to the participants' standard writing ability. The personal‐pronoun data clearly showed that adolescents used the familiar form of ‘you’ (tu) to address the peer and the unfamiliar form (vous) to address the teacher. We conclude that, for adolescents, e‐mail constitutes a distinct written‐language register. Nevertheless, the e‐mail register seems to follow the pragmatic rules of standard spoken and written interaction.     

Sentence reading: do we make use of orthographic cues in homophones?

Starting from the finding that currently phonological models of visual word processing predominate, we examined what happened when important morphological information is disclosed in the orthography but not in the phonology. To do so, we made use of a peculiarity in Dutch. In this language, some forms of the present and the past tense of verbs are homophones or homographs. This allowed us to look at the power of orthographic and phonological cues to derive the tense of the verb. Two experiments showed that orthographic cues alone suffice to recover the tense of the verb, and that this recovery does not take more time than tense recovery on the basis of a combination of orthographic and phonological cues. On the basis of these results, we conclude that orthographic cues in homophones are very efficient during silent reading. Our findings, however, do not allow us to conclude whether this is due to a direct route from orthography to meaning, or to a specialised, morpho-syntactic back-up strategy elicited by certain sequences of letters.     

Phonological and semantic information in adults' orthographic learning

A training paradigm was used to assess the early stages of the acquisition of novel letter strings in adults. Provision of either phonological or semantic information during training improved spelling recognition (Experiment 1). Manipulation of the processing required during training (phonological, semantic, or both) produced no consistent effects on spelling when both phonology and meaning were provided (Experiment 2). An advantage of phonological over orthographic processing on spelling recognition and cued recall was found when meaning was provided during training but phonology was not (Experiment 3). The experiments support the role of phonological information in early learning of orthography, but additional research is required to clarify when and how semantic information supports the formation of new orthographic representations.     

The MRC psycholinguistic database

This paper describes a computerised database of psycholinguistic information. Semantic, syntactic, phonological and orthographic information about some or all of the 98,538 words in the database is accessible, by using a specially-written and very simple programming language. Word-association data are also included in the database. Some examples are given of the use of the database for selection of stimuli to be used in psycholinguistic experimentation or linguistic research.     

The role of inferior frontal cortex in phonological processing

Recent neuroimaging studies of language processing are examining the neural substrate of phonology because of its critical role in mapping sound information onto higher levels of language processing (e.g., words) as well as providing codes in which verbal information can be temporarily stored in working memory. However, the precise role of the inferior frontal cortex in spoken and written phonological tasks has remained elusive. Although lesion studies have indicated the presence of selective deficits in phonological processing, the location of lesions underlying these impairments has not revealed a consistent pattern. Despite efforts to refine methods and tasks, functional neuroimaging studies have also revealed variability in activation patterns. Reanalysis of evidence from these neuroimaging studies suggests that there are functional subregions within the inferior frontal gyrus that correspond to specific components of phonological processing (e.g., orthographic to phonological conversion in reading, and segmentation in speech).