The orthographic effects on speech processing: beyond the “automaticity vs. strategy” debate.
Résumé
Behavioral evidence for the orthographic effects on speech processing was first observed in metaphonological tasks more than 30 years ago. This pioneering observation led to a long-standing debate on the automaticity of the effects. In spite of a huge amount of work devoted to tease apart the automatic vs. strategic account of the orthographic influence on speech processing, this issue remains difficult to resolve in the context of metaphonological tasks. More recently, many research groups start using spoken word recognition tasks to probe the orthographic effects. This change of experimental paradigm combined with recent data from brain imaging studies have shifted the focus of the debate from the automaticity issue to the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the contribution orthography to speech processing. During the talk, I will present studies that shed light on this issue. The implication of these findings on speech processing models will be discussed.