A cross-linguistic study on orthographic influence during auditory word recognition.

Learning to read affects speech perception. For example, the ability of listeners to recognize consistently spelled words faster than inconsistently spelled words is a robustfinding called the Orthographic Consistency Effect (OCE). Previous studies located the OCE at the rime level and focused on languages with opaque orthographies. This study investigates whether the OCE also emerges at the phonemic level and is a general phenomenon of languages with alphabetic scripts, including those with transparentwriting systems. Thirty French (opaque language) and 30 Spanish (transparent language) listeners participated in an auditory lexical decision task featuring words and pseudowords including either only consistently spelled phonemes or also inconsistently spelled phonemes. Our results revealed an OCE in both French and Spanish whichsurfaced as longer reaction times and higher error rates in response to inconsistently spelled words and pseudowords. These findings have two theoretical implications.First, they show that auditory lexical processing is impacted by orthographic information that is retrieved at the phonemic level, not just the rime level. Second, they suggest that the OCE is elicited during auditory processing of alphabetic languages regardless of their opacity level. In conclusion, our study highlights the depth of literacy effects on auditory language processing.