Orthographic effects in speech perception: Do we represent what we never hear

Orthographic knowledge has been demonstrated to play a role in auditory word recognition. However, the precise nature of this role remains to be determined. One possibility for the nature of these orthographic effects suggests that exposure to written language results in restructuring of a lexical representation. Previous research (Ranbom and Connine, 2007, submitted) has suggested that exposure to orthographic forms results in the development of orthographically influenced phonological representations in the lexicon. This view is examined in three experiments examining words with high-frequency orthography/phonology mappings (i.e. leaf) and word with low-frequency orthography/phonology mappings (i.e. deaf). A visuoauditory priming experiment and an eye-tracking study demonstrate the ability of a visual form to activate a never-heard phonological representation corresponding to the more-frequent orthography-phonology mapping (e.g. [dif] for deaf). A phonological identity priming experiment demonstrated that these never-heard phonological representations are able to activate a lexical representation. The consequences of this additional phonological representation derived from reading on existing models of spoken and written word recognition are discussed.