Lexical access and the spelling-to-sound regularity effect

A number of investigators have reported that words that follow spelling-to-sound rules can be recognized faster than words that violate such rules (the “regularity” effect). On occasion, the absence of a regularity effect is reported, however. The first two experiments of the present paper report that a regularity effect can be obtained in a lexical decision task with word sets that previously have been reported not to produce such an effect, when consideration is given to the consistency or inconsistency of the pronunciations of each word’s visually similar ‘neighbors” Subsequent experiments demonstrated that the obtained regularity effect does not vary as a function of mixed- vs. single-case presentation (Experiment 3) or visual quality (Experiment 4) in a lexical decision task. These results are explained in terms of Glushko’s (1979) activation and synthesis model of lexical access. It is argued that the obtained results are incompatible with traditional dual process models of lexical access (which incorporate separate visual and phonological pathways and spelling-to-sound rules) and fully compatible with Glushko’s model. It is concluded that spelling-to-sound regularity is not a property of a word in isolation, but rather a property of a word in the context of visually similar words that are activated in the course of recognition.