Schlöffel, S. 1 , Marie, L. 1 , Manuel, C. 1, 2 & Martin, C. 1, 2
1 BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 IKERBASQUE
Learning to read has a profound impact on language processing. In fact, once we are aware of a word´s orthography, it becomes almost impossible to ignore, even if there is no need to access the written word form. The present study aims to extend the literature on orthographic effects on speech perception by investigating whether this influence extends beyond overt features such as grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Taking advantage of noun capitalization in German, we asked German natives to listen to pairs of words and indicate whether they shared either their first and/or last sound. Unbeknownst to participants, the two words of a pair, if written down, either both began with a capital letter (noun-noun) or not (noun-adjective). Critically, the stimuli were presented exclusively in the auditory modality and participants were unaware of the capitalization manipulation. Results revealed that, despite the purely auditory nature of the task, pairs with two ?capitalized? words were responded to significantly faster, suggesting that abstract orthographic features can indeed affect speech perception. It appears that those features, when learning to read, are integrated into a word?s lexical representation and are thus automatically accessed even when the task does not require it.