Schlöffel, S. 1 , Clara, M. 1, 2 , Marie, L. 1 , Sendy, C. 1 & Manuel, C. 1, 2
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 Ikerbasque
Orthographic depth, or the relative consistency of letter-to-sound mappings, has been proposed to result in differences in reading strategies across languages. To investigate whether the influence of learning the grapheme-phoneme conversion rules of a language also extends to non-linguistic processes, we tested children learning to read as well as proficient readers of Spanish (consistent) and French (inconsistent).
Participants completed two phases, learning and test. During the learning phase they were presented with tone-shape pairs, the tones being either consistently paired with one shape (simple rule) or with two different shapes (complex rule). During both phases, participants pressed the button corresponding to the tone, while also being presented with a task-irrelevant shape. Critically, test phase trials were either congruent or incongruent with the tone-shape pairings acquired in the earlier learning phase.
It was expected that, before being confident of the grapheme-phoneme conversion rules in their languages, both groups should behave similarly. In contrast, proficient readers were expected to differ, with French readers showing an equally large incongruency effect for simple and complex pairings (indicating the acceptance that one sound can be mapped onto two different shapes), while Spanish readers should learn only the simple but not the complex rule, in line with their reading experience (i.e. the one-to-one correspondence of letters and sounds in Spanish). Results and implications will be discussed.