Short Report Orthographic Effects on Phoneme Monitoring

Abstract A widely used task in the research on spoken word recognition is phoneme monitoring, in which subjects have to detect phonemes in spoken words. It is generally assumed that this task is performed using phonetic or phonological representations of words only. To test whether an orthographic representation of the words is employed as well, an experiment was conducted in which Dutch subjects monitored for phonemes with either a primary or secondary spelling in phonologically matched spoken words and nonwords. Phoneme monitor-ing times were slower when the phoneme had a secondary spelling than when it had a primary spelling. The effect was greater after than before the uniqueness point of the word, and monitoring times were faster for words than for nonwords. These findings indicate that an orthographic representation of words is engaged in phoneme monitoring. Resume Un test souvent utilise dans la recherche sur la reconnais-sance du langage parle est celui du controle phonemique, c'est-a-dire la ou on demande aux sujets de deceler les phonemes dans les expressions orales. E