Tracking the time course of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition.

Abstract

Two experiments evaluated the time course and use of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition in a visual world eye-tracking experiment using printed words as referents. Participants saw four words on a computer screen and listened to spoken sentences instructing them to click on one of the words (e.g., Click on the word bead). The printed words appeared 200 ms before the onset of the spoken target word. In Experiment 1, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree of phonological overlap with the target (bear) or a higher degree of phonological overlap with the target (bean). Both competitors had the same degree of orthographic overlap with the target. There were more fixations to the competitors than to unrelated distracters. Crucially, the likelihood of fixating a competitor did not vary as a function of the amount of phonological overlap between target and competitor. In Experiment 2, the display included the target word and a competitor with either a lower degree of orthographic overlap with the target (bare) or a higher degree of orthographic overlap with the target (bear). Competitors were homophonous and thus had the same degree of phonological overlap with the target. There were more fixations to higheroverlap competitors than to lower-overlap competitors, beginning during the temporal interval where initial fixations driven by the vowel are expected to occur. The authors conclude that orthographic information is rapidly activated as a spoken word unfolds and is immediately used in mapping spoken words onto potential printed referents. Keywordsspoken-word recognition; orthography; phonology; visual-world paradigm; eye movements One of the more surprising findings in research on spoken-word recognition is that orthographic representations become available upon hearing a spoken word (see Frost & Ziegler, 2007, for a review). An early study by Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) found that rhyme judgments for pairs of spoken words were delayed for orthographically dissimilar words (e.g., tie…rye) compared to orthographically similar words (e.g., tie…lie). Orthographic information is not relevant for making rhyme judgments, and therefore, a priori, one would not expect to find evidence for the activation of orthographic information in this task. Initially, there were concerns that this result might be due to strategic processing of the stimuli (but cf. Donnenwerth-Nolan, Tanenhaus, & Seidenberg, 1981;Tanenhaus, Flanigan, & Seidenberg, 1980). However, later studies have employed paradigms using less explicit response measures. For instance, Ziegler and Ferrand (1998) demonstrated that in an auditory lexical decision task, participants make slower responses to words that are orthographically inconsistent (i.e., words whose rhyme can be spelled in multiple ways, e.g. beak), than to words that are orthographically consistent (i.e., words whose rhyme can be spelled in only one way, e.g. luck). Orthographic effects have been found in a variety of other tasks, suc...

Sink positive: Linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition

“…The increase in preview time for the German recordings was necessary to keep the timing between visual stimulus onset and target word onset comparable between the two experiments (due to the faster speaking rate of the German speaker). Note that the duration of the preview time follows previous research that has shown that longer preview times (e.g., about 1,000-1,500 ms) maximize phonological effects in the mapping process between a printed and a spoken word (Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010).…”

Semantic information mediates visual attention during spoken word recognition in Chinese: Evidence from the printed-word version of the visual-world paradigm

“…Could the semantic effect observed in Experiment 1 have resulted not from semantic overlap, but rather from orthographic similarity between the spoken target words and the competitor words? Previous studies using the visual-world paradigm showed that fixations on printed words are sensitive to the degree of orthographic overlap between spoken and printed words (Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010). In Experiment 1, the orthographic similarity between the semantic competitor and spoken target words in some stimuli made the explanation of "orthographic similarity" plausible.…”

“…Previous studies using the printed version of visual-world paradigm showed that fixations on a competitor varied as a function of orthographic overlap (Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010): Competitors with high orthographic overlap attracted more fixations than did those with low orthographic overlap. Since some of the target words and semantic/phonology competitors in Experiment 1 shared radicals in some stimuli, it was possible that the semantic/ phonology competitor effects observed in that experiment were caused by orthographic similarities.…”

“…Huettig and McQueen (2007) also developed a variant of the classic visual-world paradigm in which a visual display depicting objects was replaced with printed words. Like the classic version, the modified printed-word version is considered a sensitive tool to investigate phonological processing during spoken word recognition (see McQueen & Viebahn, 2007;Salverda & Tanenhaus, 2010;Weber, Melinger, & Tapia, 2007). In McQueen and Viebahn (2007), Dutch participants were presented with a target word, a phonological competitor word, and two unrelated distractor words.…”

“…However, it is highly likely that this effect has been confounded by orthographic processing, given that the two properties are closely linked in alphabetic languages. Indeed, Salverda and Tanenhaus (2010) manipulated the phonological overlap between the target word and a competitor in the display to be either high or low after the orthographic overlap was controlled. They found that the proportions of fixations on the competitor in this case did not differ as a function of phonological overlap.…”