This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter <e>. Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.
AllopennaP.MagnusonJ. S.TanenhausM. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 419–439. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2558
2.
BakkerI.TakashimaA.van HellJ. G.JanzenG.McQueenJ. M. (2014). Competition from unseen or unheard novel words: Lexical consolidation across modalities. Journal of Memory and Language, 73, 116–130. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.03.002
3.
BarrD. J.LevyR.ScheepersC.TilyH. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001
4.
BrowmanC.GoldsteinL. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49, 155–180.
5.
BürkiA.ErnestusM.FrauenfelderU. H. (2010). Is there only one “fenêtre” in the production lexicon? On-line evidence on the nature of phonological representations of pronunciation variants for French schwa words. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 421–437. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2010.01.002
6.
BürkiA.FrauenfelderU. H. (2012). Producing and recognizing words with two pronunciation variants: Evidence from novel schwa words. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 796–824. doi:10.1080/17470218.2011.634915
7.
BürkiA.SpinelliE.GaskellM. G. (2012). A written word is worth a thousand spoken words: The influence of spelling on spoken-word production. Journal of Memory and Language, 67, 449–467. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.001
8.
CôtéM.MorrisonG. S. (2007). The nature of the schwa/zero alternation in French clitics: Experimental and non-experimental evidence. Journal of French Language Studies, 17, 159–186.
9.
CreelS. C.AslinR. N.TanenhausM. K. (2008). Heeding the voice of experience: The role of talker variation in lexical access. Cognition, 106, 633–664. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.013
10.
CutlerA.DavisC. (2012). An orthographic effect in phoneme processing, and its limitations. Language Sciences, 3, 18. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00018
11.
CutlerA.TreimanR.van OoijenB. (2010). Strategic deployment of orthographic knowledge in phoneme detection. Language and Speech, 53, 307–320. doi:10.1177/0023830910371445
12.
ErnestusM. (2000). Voice assimilation and segment reduction in casual Dutch: A corpus-based study of the phonology-phonetics interface. Utrecht, The Netherlands: LOT. Retrieved from http://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/29974
13.
ErnestusM.SmithR. (in press). Qualitative and quantitative aspects of phonetic variation in Dutch eigenlijk. In CangemiF.ClayardsM.NiebuhrO.SchupplerB.ZellersM. (Eds.), Rethinking reduction. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.
14.
ErnestusM.WarnerN. (2011). An introduction to reduced pronunciation variants. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 253–260. doi:10.1016/S0095-4470(11)00055-6
15.
GraingerJ.MuneauxM.Farioli ZieglerJ. C. (2005). Effects of phonological and orthographic neighbourhood density interact in visual word recognition. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 981–998. doi:10.1080/02724980443000386
16.
HaniqueI.ErnestusM.SchupplerB. (2013). Informal speech processes can be categorical in nature, even if they affect many different words. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133, 1644–1655. doi:10.1121/1.4790352
17.
JohnsonK. (2004). Massive reduction in conversational American English. In YoneyamaK.MaekawaK. (Eds.), Spontaneous speech: Data and analysis. Proceedings of the 1st Session of the 10th International Symposium. Tokyo, Japan: The National International Institute for Japanese Language (pp. 29–54).
18.
LaheyM.ErnestusM. (2014). Pronunciation variation in infant-directed speech: Phonetic reduction of two highly frequent words. Language Learning and Development, 10, 308–327.
19.
LeveltW. J. M.RoelofsA.MeyerA. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.
20.
LuceP. A.McLennanC. T. (2005). Spoken word recognition: The challenge of variation. In PisoniD. B.RemezR. E. (Eds.), The handbook of speech perception (pp. 591–609). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
21.
MagnusonJ. S.TanenhausM.AslinR.DahanD. (2003). The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 202–227. doi:10.1037/0096–3445.132.2.202
22.
MagnusonJ. S.TanenhausM. K.AslinR. N. (2008). Immediate effects of form-class constraints on spoken word recognition. Cognition, 108, 866–873. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.06.005
23.
McQueenJ. M.ViebahnM. C. (2007). Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 661–671. doi:10.1080/17470210601183890
24.
MirmanD. (2014). Growth curve analysis and visualization using R. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis Group.
25.
MirmanD.DixonJ. A.MagnusonJ. S. (2008). Statistical and computational models of the visual world paradigm: Growth curves and individual differences. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 475–494. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.006
26.
MittererH.McQueenJ. M. (2009). Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 244–263. doi:10.1037/a0012730
27.
MittererH.ReinischE. (2015). Letters don’t matter: No effect of orthography on the perception of conversational speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 85, 116–134. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2015.08.005
28.
PattamadilokC.MoraisJ.ColinC.KolinskyR. (2014). Unattentive speech processing is influenced by orthographic knowledge: Evidence from mismatch negativity. Brain and Language, 137, 103–111.
29.
PerreL.BertrandD.ZieglerJ. (2011). Literacy affects spoken language in a non-linguistic task: An ERP study. Language Sciences, 2, 274. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00274
30.
PerreL.PattamadilokC.MontantM.ZieglerJ. C. (2009). Orthographic effects in spoken language: On-line activation or phonological restructuring?Brain Research, 1275, 73–80. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2009.04.018
31.
PickeringM. J.GarrodS. (2013). An integrated theory of language production and comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 329–347. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12001495
32.
RacineI.BürkiA.SpinelliE. (2013). The implication of spelling and frequency in the recognition of phonological variants: Evidence from pre-readers and readers. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 893–898. doi:10.1080/01690965.2013.832784
33.
RanbomL. J.ConnineC. M. (2007). Lexical representation of phonological variation in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 273–298. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.04.001
34.
RanbomL. J.ConnineC. M. (2011). Silent letters are activated in spoken word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 236–261. doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.486578
35.
SeidenbergM. S.TanenhausM. K. (1979). Orthographic effects on rhyme monitoring. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 546–554. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.5.6.546
36.
SulpizioS.McQueenJ. M. (2011). When two newly-acquired words are one: New words differing in stress alone are not automatically represented differently. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 1385–1388).
37.
SulpizioS.McQueenJ. M. (2012). Italians use abstract knowledge about lexical stress during spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 177–193. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.08.001
38.
TaftM.CastlesA.DavisC.LazendicG.Nguyen-HoanM. (2008). Automatic activation of orthography in spoken word recognition: Pseudohomograph priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 366–379. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.002
39.
ZieglerJ. C.FerrandL. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 683–689.
40.
ZieglerJ. C.FerrandL.MontantM. (2004). Visual phonology: The effects of orthographic consistency on different auditory word recognition tasks. Memory & Cognition, 32, 732–741.
41.
ZieglerJ. C.JacobsA. M.StoneG. O. (1996). Statistical analysis of the bidirectional inconsistency of spelling and sound in French. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 28, 504–515. doi:10.3758/BF03200539
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
