Is Perception a Two-Way Street? The Case of Feedback Consistency in Visual Word Recognition

Abstract

It is generally assumed that during reading, the activation produced over orthographic units feeds forward to phonological units. Supporting interactive models of word recognition, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) recently claimed that phonological activation reverberates to orthographic processing units and consequently constrains orthographic encoding. They found that the consistency of the relations between phonology and orthography (feedback consistency) influenced lexical decision performance. We explored the effect in five experiments conducted with French words. Although feedback consistency affected writing performance, no significant effect was observed in lexical decision even when inconsistency was defined so as to maximize the effect. We also show that previous reports of consistency effects in French (Ziegler, Montant, & Jacobs, 1997a) may be due to a confound between consistency and word frequency, as assessed by subjective frequency estimates. We conclude that there is at present little evidence that sound-to-print consistency influences orthographic encoding in visual word recognition.

Predictors of timed picture naming in Chinese

“…However, we question whether estimates of printed-word frequency are meaningful predictors of picture naming latency. Ratings of familiarity are correlated with objective measures of printed-word frequency (Peereman, Content, & Bonin, 1998). We con- tend that familiarity ratings may be preferable estimates of the effects of word frequency on spoken word processing in Putonghua.…”

Visual phonology: The effects of orthographic consistency on different auditory word recognition tasks

“…This account would naturally predict that the size of the consistency effect decreases as the task relies less and less on accessing lexical representations, as indeed is the case in the present study. Note also that the restructuring account does not have to rely on on-line feedback to explain the existence of an orthographic effect (for discussions, see Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000;Peereman et al, 1998; but see also Luce, Goldinger, & Vitevitch, 2000). Instead, orthographic information would have had its major impact during a developmental restructuring phase of lexical representations (i.e., off line).…”

“…As can be seen in Table 1, the three groups were still tightly matched even when the more contemporary frequency norms were used. To complement the objective frequency measures, we also obtained subjective familiarity ratings (see, e.g., Peereman, Content, & Bonin, 1998). Twenty students who had not participated in the experiment rated familiarity using a 7-point scale on which1 was very unfamiliar and 7 very familiar.…”

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition: The consistency effect in semantic and gender categorization tasks

“…This model offers a nice framework for accounting for orthographic influences on spoken word recognition, since it assumes fast orthographic activation during processing, but the additional key assumption that activation reverberates between orthographic and phonological units has not yet received clear empirical support. In particular, several studies on printed word recognition have failed to show that consistency in the mapping between phonology and orthography (i.e., feedback consistency) influences performance (Kessler, Treiman, & Mullennix, 2007;Peereman, Content, & Bonin, 1998;Ziegler, Petrova, & Ferrand, 2008). Turning to the models specifically developed for spoken word recognition, none of them allow orthographic knowledge to affect performance.…”