The role of phonology-to-spelling consistency (i.e., feedback consistency) was investigated in 3 lexical decision experiments in both the visual and auditory modalities in French and English. No evidence for a feedback consistency effect was found in the visual modality, either in English or in French, despite the fact that consistency was manipulated for different kinds of units (onsets and rimes). In contrast, robust feedback consistency effects were obtained in the auditory lexical decision task in both English and French when exactly the same items that produced a null effect in the visual modality were used. Neural network simulations are presented to show that previous demonstrations of feedback consistency effects in the visual modality can be simulated with a model that is not sensitive to feedback consistency, suggesting that these effects might have come from various confounds. These simulations, together with the authors' results, suggest that there are no feedback consistency effects in the visual modality. In contrast, such effects are clearly present in the auditory modality. Given that orthographic information is absent from current models of spoken word recognition, the present findings present a major challenge to these models.

Many studies have repeatedly shown an orthographic consistency effect in the auditory lexical decision task. Words with phonological rimes that could be spelled in multiple ways (i.e., inconsistent words) typically produce longer auditory lexical decision latencies and more errors than do words with rimes that could be spelled in only one way (i.e., consistent words). These results have been extended to different languages and tasks, suggesting that the effect is quite general and robust. Despite this growing body of evidence, some psycholinguists believe that orthographic effects on spoken language are exclusively strategic, post-lexical, or restricted to peculiar (low-frequency) words. In the present study, we manipulated consistency and word-frequency orthogonally in order to explore whether the orthographic consistency effect extends to high-frequency words. Two different tasks were used: lexical decision and rime detection. Both tasks produced reliable consistency effects for both low- and high-frequency words. Furthermore, in Experiment 1 (lexical decision), an interaction revealed a stronger consistency effect for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words, as initially predicted by Ziegler and Ferrand (1998), whereas no interaction was found in Experiment 2 (rime detection). Our results extend previous findings by showing that the orthographic consistency effect is obtained not only for low-frequency words but also for high-frequency words. Furthermore, these effects were also obtained in a rime detection task, which does not require the explicit processing of orthographic structure. Globally, our results suggest that literacy changes the way people process spoken words, even for frequent words.

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