Laetitia Perre

The role of orthography in speech production revisited.

The language production system of literate adults comprises an orthographic system (used during written language production) and a phonological system (used during spoken language production). Recent psycholinguistic research has investigated possible influences of the orthographic system on the phonological system. This research has produced contrastive results, with some studies showing effects of orthography in the course of normal speech production while others failing to show such effects. In this article, we review the available evidence and consider possible explanations for the discrepancy. We then report two form-preparation experiments which aimed at testing for the effects of orthography in spoken word-production. Our results provide clear evidence that the orthographic properties of the words do not influence their spoken production in picture naming. We discuss this finding in relation to psycholinguistic and neuropsychological investigations of the relationship between written and spoken word-production.

Beyond rhyme or reason: ERPs reveal task-specific activation of orthography on spoken language

Metaphonological tasks, such as rhyme judgment, have been the primary tool for the investigation of the effects of orthographic knowledge on spoken language. However, it has been recently argued that the orthography effect in rhyme judgment does not reflect the automatic activation of orthographic codes but rather stems from sophisticated response strategies. Such a claim stands in sharp contrast with recent findings using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in lexical and semantic tasks, which were taken to suggest that orthographic information occurs early enough to affect the core process of lexical access. Here, we show that the electrophysiological signature of the orthography effect in rhyme judgment is indeed different from the one obtained in online lexical or semantic tasks. That is, we did not find the orthography effect in the 300-350 ms time window which has previously been shown to process lexical information in the lexico-semantic tasks, but the effect appeared within the 175-250 ms and the 375-750 ms time-windows which we interpreted to reflect segmentation and decisional process, respectively. We conclude that the interactions between phonology and orthography are task-specific. Metaphonological tasks appear of limited use for studying the core processes and interactions that underlie lexical access.

Literacy Affects Spoken Language in a Non-Linguistic Task: An ERP Study

It is now commonly accepted that orthographic information influences spoken word recognition in a variety of laboratory tasks (lexical decision, semantic categorization, gender decision). However, it remains a hotly debated issue whether or not orthography would influence normal word perception in passive listening. That is, the argument has been made that orthography might only be activated in laboratory tasks that require lexical or semantic access in some form or another. It is possible that these rather “unnatural” tasks invite participants to use orthographic information in a strategic way to improve task performance. To put the strategy account to rest, we conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study, in which participants were asked to detect a 500-ms-long noise burst that appeared on 25% of the trials (Go trials). In the NoGo trials, we presented spoken words that were orthographically consistent or inconsistent. Thus, lexical and/or semantic processing was not required in this task and there was no strategic benefit in computing orthography to perform this task. Nevertheless, despite the non-linguistic nature of the task, we replicated the consistency effect that has been previously reported in lexical decision and semantic tasks (i.e., inconsistent words produce more negative ERPs than consistent words as early as 300 ms after the onset of the spoken word). These results clearly suggest that orthography automatically influences word perception in normal listening even if there is no strategic benefit to do so. The results are explained in terms of orthographic restructuring of phonological representations.

Phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers. An intermodal priming study in Grades 3 and 5

This study investigated the phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers as a function of general reading expertise (third and fifth grades) and specific word exposure (frequent and less-frequent words). An intermodal priming in lexical decision task was performed. Auditory primes (identical and unrelated) were used in order to directly activate phonological codes independently of orthographic processing. Overall, the results revealed a widespread phonological priming effect in both grades. There was a significant interaction between grade, priming condition and frequency, revealing that the impact of frequency on identity priming differed between grades. In third grade, the results indicated that the priming effect was greater for less-frequent than for frequent words. In fifth grade, priming effects were similar for both frequent and less-frequent words. These findings indicate that print and speech processing systems are interconnected in young readers. Moreover, phonological codes play an important role in word recognition throughout reading development.

Co-occurrence frequency evaluated with large language corpora boosts semantic priming effects.

In recent decades, many computational techniques have been developed to analyse the contextual usage of words in large language corpora. The present study examined whether the co-occurrence frequency obtained from large language corpora might boost purely semantic priming effects. Two experiments were conducted: one with conscious semantic priming, the other with subliminal semantic priming. Both experiments contrasted three semantic priming contexts: an unrelated priming context and two related priming contexts with word pairs that are semantically related and that co-occur either frequently or infrequently. In the conscious priming presentation (166-ms stimulus-onset asynchrony, SOA), a semantic priming effect was recorded in both related priming contexts, which was greater with higher co-occurrence frequency. In the subliminal priming presentation (66-ms SOA), no significant priming effect was shown, regardless of the related priming context. These results show that co-occurrence frequency boosts pure semantic priming effects and are discussed with reference to models of semantic network.

Phonemic feature involvement in lexical access in grades 3 and 5: Evidence from visual and auditory lexical decision tasks

Numerous studies have evidenced the involvement of the phonological code during visual word recognition not only in skilled adult readers but also in child readers. Moreover, in skilled adult readers, visual word processing has been shown to be sensitive to phonetic details such as phonemic features (e.g., manner of articulation, place of articulation, voicing and nasality in French) which are typically involved in phonological lexicon access during speech processing. In contrast, it is not known whether and when visual word recognition is affected by phonemic features during learning to read. The present study investigates this issue in third and fifth graders. A lexical decision task was performed in visual and auditory modalities. Targets were French words (e.g., piano [piano]) and pseudowords created from target words. Mismatching was on the first phoneme. There were one-feature phoneme mismatch pseudowords (e.g., tiano) and multiple-feature phoneme mismatch pseudowords (e.g., liano). The pseudowords were used as a marker of the sensitivity to phonemic features in phonological lexicon access. Phonemic feature effects were found in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks in both grades, indicating that phonological lexicon access involves phonemic features in print processing as in speech processing. In contrast, the absence of difference between both grades seems to indicate that this effect is independent of age or, more precisely, of phonological development and reading performance.

Automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in bilingual children : a cross-language masked priming study in grades 3 and 5

Previous masked priming research has shown automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in monolingual skilled adult readers. Activation also occurs across languages in bilingual adult readers, suggesting that the activation of phonological representations is not language specific. Less is known about developing readers. First, it is unclear whether there is automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition among children in general. Second, no empirical data exist on whether the activation of phonological representations is language specific or not in bilingual children. The current study investigated these issues in bilingual third and fifth graders using cross-language phonological masked priming in a lexical decision task. Targets were French words, and primes were English pseudowords of three types: (a) phonological primes, which share phonological information with the target beginning (e.g., dee-DIMANCHE [Sunday], pronounced /di:/-/dimãʃ/); (b) orthographic control primes, which control for letters shared by the phonological prime and target (e.g., d) and their position (e.g., doo-DIMANCHE, pronounced /du:/-/dimãʃ/); and (c) unrelated primes, which share no phonological or orthographic information with the target beginning (e.g., pow-DIMANCHE, pronounced /paʊ/-/dimãʃ/). Significant phonological priming was observed, suggesting that (a) phonological representations are rapidly and automatically activated by print during visual word recognition from Grade 3 onward and that (b) the activation of phonological representations is not language specific in bilingual children.