Orthography Influences the Perception and Production of Speech

Abstract

One intriguing question in language research concerns the extent to which orthographic information impacts on spoken word processing. Previous research has faced a number of methodological difficulties and has not reached a definitive conclusion. Our research addresses these difficulties by capitalizing on recent developments in the area of word learning. Participants were trained to criterion on a set of associations between novel pictures and novel spoken words. Spellingsound consistent or inconsistent spellings were introduced on the second day, and the influence of these spellings on speech processing was assessed on the third day. Results showed for the first time significant orthographic effects on speech perception and speech production in a situation in which spelling-sound consistency was manipulated with perfect experimental control. Results are discussed in terms of a highly interactive language system in which there is a rapid and automatic flow of activation in both directions between orthographic and phonological representations. Orthography influences the perception 3It is often said that spoken language has primacy over written language. Before acquiring skills in reading and writing, most children have expertise in understanding and producing speech.Indeed, while we are born with the propensity to use spoken language, reading is a learned form of expertise. It is not surprising, then, that language subsystems supporting reading are often characterized as being parasitic on those supporting our spoken abilities (e.g. Pinker, 1997). In line with this characterisation, there is a broad consensus that our experience with the sounds of words (phonology) plays a powerful role in learning to read (e.g. Rayner et al., 2001) and in adult visual word processing (e.g. Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006).The question that has received less attention is whether our experience with the spellings of words (orthography) comes to influence our spoken abilities. Though inconsistent with the primacy model, an increasing body of literature suggests that speech perception may be shaped by information about the printed forms of words, and there is limited research suggesting that the same could be true of speech production. These data have raised the remarkable possibility that information about the

Children reading spoken words: interactions between vocabulary and orthographic expectancy

“…McKague, Davis, Pratt, and Johnston (2008; see also Johnston, McKague, & Pratt, 2004) conducted a learning study in which they taught adults the pronunciations and meanings of sets of novel words. This is consistent with reports from a range of studies of skilled readers of pervasive effects of orthography on spoken word processing (e.g., Chéreau, Gaskell, & Dumay, 2007;Rastle, McCormick, Bayliss, & Davis, 2011;Taft, Castles, Davis, & Lazendic, 2008). In a condition in which the initial training was in oral form only, the participants' subsequent visual word recognition was disrupted by spelling inconsistency, suggesting that they had generated some kind of orthographic expectancy about the words based on their phonology.…”

Literacy acquisition influences children's rapid automatized naming

“…Even for non-alphanumeric RAN, orthographic effects are difficult to exclude. Orthographic effects emerge early in literacy development (Castles, et al, 2011), and orthographic effects on isolated picture naming have been demonstrated in adults (Rastle et al, 2011). Even partial knowledge about the orthography of a pictured item (such as what letter an object name begins with) could plausibly promote greater phonological activation for the to-be-named items and hence faster RAN.…”

“…Pioneering work (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979) demonstrated that literacy influences performance on meta-phonological tasks previously conceptualized purely as reading predictors. There has recently been mounting interest in understanding how written language impacts a variety of oral language processes (Nation & Hulme, 2011; Pattamadilok, Perre, & Ziegler, 2011; Rastle, McCormick, Bayliss, & Davis, 2011). However, relatively little research has investigated whether literacy exerts an effect on rapid automatized naming (RAN), a well-established reading-related skill.…”

“…One interpretation is thus that the process of becoming a fluent reader improves children’s ability to process multiple targets, which in turn supports better serial RAN. Finally, experimental work has demonstrated that literate adults mandatorily activate orthographic codes in picture naming (Rastle et al, 2011). As children learn to read, such a process could lead to higher activations of lexical phonology (and hence faster naming times) for items in the RAN response set.…”

Learning to speak by listening: Transfer of phonotactics from perception to production

“…In the opposite condition, transfer may have occurred as the orthographic forms of both fes and sef syllables were encoded. Moreover, the orthographic representations of syllables that participants heard may have activated output phonology through well-established orthography-to-phonology mappings (Damian & Bowers, 2009; Laszlo & Federmeier, 2007; Lupker, 1982; Rastle et al, 2011; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), causing perceived constraints to be represented in the production system. Given the distinct possibility of this alternative explanation, Warker et al conservatively concluded in the title of their article: “Speech errors reflect the phonotactic constraints in recently spoken syllables, but not in recently heard syllables”.…”