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Mental representation of the syllable internal structure are influenced by orthography

par Ventura, Paulo;Kolinsky, Régine ;De Brito Mendes, Carlos ;Morais, Jose
Référence Language and cognitive processes, 16, 4, page (393-418)
Publication Publié, 2001

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

Seven experiments run in Portuguese examined the role of orthography in blending phonologically defined CVC syllables written either with a final mute "e" (orthographic disyllables) or with a final consonant (orthographic monosyllables). Participants clearly relied on the spelling of the words (Experiment 1): the preferred blend was C/VC for words spelled with a final consonant but CV/C for words spelled with a final mute "e". The CV/C preference for mute-e-words was observed even when instructions emphasised the importance of their "sounds" (Experiment 5) and even when the two materials shared exactly the same rimes (Experiment 6). The blending pattern for pseudo-words shows that participants relied on the spelling of pseudo-words' neighbours (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the influence of orthography was observed for pseudo-words and homophonic words, depending on the spelling of contextual words (Experiments 3 and 4): the C/VC segmentation of pseudo-words and homophones was much more frequent in a context of words spelled CVC than in a context of mute-e-words. Finally, there was no substantial reduction of the spelling effect when crossing the acoustic portion of the rime between stimuli (Experiment 7) allowed control of possible acoustic-phonetic effects. The whole pattern of results shows that our phonological judgements about the structure of the syllable are shaped by the links between phonology and orthography.