Petrova, A. & Gaskell, G.
University of York, UK
Several studies carried out using the lexical decision task suggest that words with consistent (one-to-one) phonology-to-spelling mappings are easier to recognise than inconsistent words (one-to-several mapping). However, these effects appear less reliable in the visual than the auditory modality. This pattern of results could indicate a qualitative difference between the recognition systems, but alternative possibilities rely on differences in informational availability between modalities. The current study addressed the latter explanation using a range of different procedures and a set of items that did not show consistency effects in the classic version of the task. We found phonology-to-spelling consistency effects in visual lexical decision task using three different item presentation methods: Experiment 1 used a short item presentation duration (100 ms), Experiment 2 used letter-by-letter presentation and Experiment 3 used presentation with visual noise. This study suggests that interactions between phonology and spelling are present not only in the auditory modality but also in the visual modality. Consistency effects may be observable easily in visual word recognition only in noisier conditions that make the recognition process more similar to auditory processing. Importantly, our results also suggest that the underlying substrates for spoken and visual word recognition operate in broadly comparable ways.