Reading with the ears: How orthography influences auditory word recognition. A cross-linguistic study.

The Orthographic Consistency Effect (OCE) demonstrates that listeners recognize consistently-spelled words faster than inconsistently-spelled words. Previous studies located the OCE at the rhyme level and focused on languages with opaque orthographies. This study investigates whether the OCE emerges at the phonemic level regardless of the opacity of the language’s writing system. Thirty French (opaque language) and 30 Spanish (transparent language) listeners participated in an auditory lexical decision task featuring words and pseudowords including either only consistently-spelled phonemes or also inconsistently-spelled phonemes. Our results revealed an OCE in French and Spanish but with a different pattern: The OCE affected French pseudoword processing and Spanish word processing. These findings have three theoretical implications. First, auditory lexical processing is impacted by orthographic information which can be retrieved at the phonemic level. Second, the OCE occurs in alphabetic languages regardless of their level of opacity. Third, not only the opacity of a language’s writing system but also the depth of the linguistic level impact auditory lexical processing.