Reading skill and exposure to orthography influence speech production

Abstract

Orthographic experience during the acquisition of novel words may influence production processing in proficient readers. Previous work indicates interactivity among lexical, phonological, and articulatory processing; we hypothesized that experience with orthography can also influence phonological processing. Phonetic accuracy and articulatory stability were measured as adult, proficient readers repeated and read aloud nonwords, presented in auditory or written modalities and with variations in orthographic neighborhood density. Accuracy increased when participants had read the nonwords earlier in the session, but not when they had only heard them. Articulatory stability increased with practice, regardless of whether nonwords were read or heard. Word attack skills, but not reading comprehension, predicted articulatory stability. Findings indicate that kinematic and phonetic accuracy analyses provide insight into how orthography influences implicit language processing.

Learning to read facilitates the retrieval of phonological representations in rapid automatized naming: Evidence from unschooled illiterate, ex‐illiterate, and schooled literate adults

“…The notion of a role of orthography in spoken word production is not new though has received less attention than in spoken word recognition. Our findings are in line with prior studies that showed influences of orthography in production by comparing the performance of literate participants on different sets of words (e.g., Rastle et al, ; Saletta, Goffman, & Brentari, ). The originality of the present study regards the strong methodological design it offered: controlling for possible confounds of formal education and related experiences, and as much as possible of maturation and cognitive development (by comparing two matched populations equally deprived of early schooling, ex‐illiterate vs. illiterate), while dispensing the between‐item designs for testing literacy effects, necessary when all participants are readers.…”

Orthography and Modality Influence Speech Production in Adults and Children

“…Fifty-two individuals participated in the study with 17 in the Adult-Typ group who ranged in age from 19 to 64 years old (M = 29.73; SD = 13.16); 17 in the child group, who ranged in age from 6.00 to 8.83 years old (M = 7.45; SD = 0.91); and 18 in the Adult-LP group, who ranged in age from 19 to 62 years old (M = 32.82; SD = 13.89). The individuals in the Adult-Typ group were drawn from a prior study of orthographic processing (Saletta et al, 2015). All participants were native speakers of English and demonstrated typical nonverbal reasoning and oral language.…”

“…The procedures were designed to evaluate the effects of modality and transparency on speech production (Saletta et al, 2015). Two measures-segmental accuracy and speech movement stability-were used to evaluate these effects.…”

“…Previous work (Saletta, Goffman, & Brentari, 2015) involved investigating the connection between reading and speech production via a group of adults with typical reading skills. Participants produced nonwords that systematically varied in modality of presentation (either auditory or written) and, within the written modality, in orthographic transparency (relatively transparent or opaque spelling).…”

“…Apart from the data from typical adult readers on the basis of our first study mentioned above (Saletta et al, 2015), existing models of speech production do not account for the influence of orthography. Most previous models of language and speech production indicate that processing stages proceed in a generally top-down manner.…”