Sound and spelling in spoken word recognition.

In several experiments, lexical decisions about spoken words were shown to be influenced by the spelling of an immediately preceding item. Specifically, lexical decisions to one-syllable words were faster when part of the preceding word shared both the same sound and spelling. Thus, a lexical decision for “mess” was faster following “message” than following “letter”. Facilitation was not observed when words were related by sound alone (e.g., “definite”-“deaf”) or by spelling alone (e.g., “legislate”-“leg”). Analogous effects of spelling were obtained for nonwords; a decision about a nonword was facilitated only when preceded by a word with shared sound and spelling (e.g., “regular”-“reg”). The implications of these results for the role of spelling in the segmentation of speech and in lexical decisions are discussed.