Effects of orthography on speech production in a form-preparation paradigm

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Abstract

Four experiments investigated potential influences of spelling on single word speech production. A form-preparation paradigm that showed priming effects for words with initial form overlap was used to investigate whether words with form overlap, but different spelling (e.g., “camel”-“kidney”) also show priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated that such words did not benefit from the form overlap, suggesting that the incongruent spelling disrupted the form-preparation effect. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment with an independent set of items and an improved design, and once again showed a disruptive effect of spelling. To divert participants’ attention from the spelling of the targets, Experiment 3 was conducted entirely in the auditory domain, but yielded the same outcome as before. Experiment 4 showed that matching initial letters alone, in the absence of matching sounds (e.g., “cycle”-“cobra”), did not produce priming. These findings raise the possibility that orthographic codes are mandatorily activated in speech production by literate speakers.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-four undergraduate students at the University of Bristol participated in this experiment for course credit. All were native speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Materials and design

The independent variable in this experiment was type of context, with the three levels: homogeneous (all responses share the initial sound and spelling), heterogeneous (responses share neither initial sound nor spelling), and inconsistent (responses share initial sound, but differ in spelling). Materials were

Participants

Twenty-four undergraduate students at the University of Bristol, none of whom had been in Experiment 1, participated in this experiment for course credit. All were native speakers of English and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Materials, design, and apparatus

A new set of 12 bi-syllabic nouns was selected from the CELEX database. Ideally, it would be desirable to employ different segmental contrasts from those used in the experiments above; however, word-initial spelling inconsistencies in the English language are not

Participants

Twenty-four undergraduate students at the University of Bristol, none of whom had been in the first two experiments, participated in this experiment for course credit. All were native speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Materials, design, and apparatus

These were identical to Experiment 1. However, prompt words were recorded by a male speaker and digitized with a sampling frequency of 16 kHz. Within the experimental blocks, prompts were presented to participants at a comfortable volume level over Sennheiser

Participants

Twenty-four undergraduate students at the University of Bristol, none of whom had been in the first three experiments, participated in this experiment for course credit. All were native speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Materials

A new set of 12 bi-syllabic nouns was selected from the CELEX database, which consisted of subsets of words that shared the same initial letter, but differed in their first phonological segment. The initial letters “c” (which can be pronounced /k/ or /s/) and

General discussion

Four experiments using a form-preparation paradigm demonstrated effects of orthography in speech production: the response time benefit deriving from a word-initial segmental overlap (originally demonstrated by Meyer, 1990, Meyer, 1991, and replicated here) is disrupted if words within a block have the same initial segment, but this segment is spelled in more than one way. At the same time, overlapping spelling, but mismatching initial segments are not enough to generate the effect. The study

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