The orthographic consistency effect in the recognition of French spoken words: An early developmental shift from sublexical to lexical orthographic activation

Abstract

The generality of the orthographic consistency effect in speech recognition tasks previously reported for Portuguese beginning readers was assessed in French-speaking children, as the French orthographic code presents a higher degree of inconsistency than the Portuguese one. Although the findings obtained with the French second graders replicated the generalized consistency effect (both for words and pseudowords, in both lexical decision and shadowing) displayed by the Portuguese second to fourth graders, the data obtained with the French third and fourth graders resembled the adult pattern, with the orthographic effect restricted to lexical decision. This suggests that, in the course of literacy acquisition, the overall orthographic inconsistency of the language's orthographic code influences the rate at which orthographic representations will impact on spoken word recognition.Learning to read and write has been shown to affect the way individuals process spoken words. Using lexical decision, Ziegler and Ferrand (1998) reported one of the most convincing and robust orthographic effects: words that end with a

The developmental turnpoint of orthographic consistency effects in speech recognition

“…Hence, children who are learning to read in a less transparent orthographic code than the Portuguese one may also present an earlier shift from the generalized orthographic consistency effect to the adult pattern. This is actually what we observed in French, a language that presents a much less transparent orthographic code than does Portuguese (Pattamadilok, Morais, De Vylder, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2008). As a matter of fact, French beginning readers reached the adult pattern of orthographic consistency effects in spoken word recognition at Grade 3, whereas second-graders displayed a generalized consistency effect in both lexical decision and shadowing, as did the Portuguese second to fourth-graders of Ventura and colleagues (2007).…”

The impact of orthographic knowledge on speech processing

“…The feedback connections and/or restructuring process take place rapidly in the course of learning to read. We demonstrated this in our developmental studies: the orthographic consistency effect emerges after about one and a half year of reading classes in both Portuguese and French (Pattamadilok, Morais, de vylder, ventura, & Kolinsky, 2009;ventura, Kolinsky, Pattamadilok, & Morais, 2008;. interestingly, in both languages this effect is initially a generalized one: contrary to adults, secondgraders present a consistency effect for both words and pseudowords, in both lexical decision and shadowing.…”

Interactive Activation and Mutual Constraint Satisfaction in Perception and Cognition

“…For example, rhyming effects on visual processing of orthographically dissimilar words have been detected around 260 ms after stimulus onset (Kramer & Donchin, ), and syllable effects in visual word processing have been shown at around 250–350 ms (Ashby & Martin, ; Carreiras, Ferrand, Grainger, & Perea, ). Consistency effects in auditory lexical decision tasks (Perre, Midgley, & Ziegler, ; Perre & Ziegler, ) and semantic categorization tasks (Pattamadilok, Perre, Dufau, & Ziegler, ;Pattamadilok, Morais, De Vylder, Ventura, & Kolinsky, ) have been shown to occur in ERP roughly 300–350 ms post‐stimulus and time locked to the point of inconsistency. Findings from MEG imaging, which provides greater spatial resolution, have localized the early rhyming effects in visual tasks to the left occipito‐temporal region (Wilson, Leuthold, Lewis, Georgopoulos, & Pardo, ).…”