The implication of spelling and frequency in the recognition of phonological variants: evidence from pre-readers and readers

Hearing a reduced variant of a word seems to delay access to the representation of this word. One hypothesis explaining the precedence of full variants over reduced ones is that they correspond to the orthographic form of the word. In this study, we examined the role of orthography on the processing of variants resulting from schwa deletion in French. In a word-monitoring experiment, we compared the performance of pre-readers and readers on two word types. For words whose schwa variants are more frequent and correspond to the words' spelling, schwa variants were recognised with shorter reaction times by both pre-readers and readers. For words whose schwa variants are less frequent but correspond to the words' spelling, non-schwa variants were recognised faster than schwa variants by pre-readers, whereas there was no difference between the two variants for readers. Taken together these results suggest that the recognition of phonological variants changes when children learn to read, highlighting the crucial role of spelling in the processing of phonological variation.

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