When does irregular spelling or pronunciation influence word recognition?

Abstract

Four experiments examined how irregularities in spelling or in the correspondence between spelling and sound influence two reading tasks, naming and lexical decision. The words studied included regular (e.g., must), exception (have), regular inconsistent (gave), and “strange” (words with unusual spelling patterns such as aisle or fuel). The results indicate that the two factors have separate effects on recognition. Irregular spelling influences performance on both tasks, while irregular spelling—sound correspondences only influence reading aloud. However, all of these effects are restricted to lower frequency words. The processing of both high and low frequency words, as well as the task differences, can be accommodated by a model that considers the time course of the activation of orthographic and phonological information.