The impact of orthographic knowledge on speech processing

Abstract

The levels-of-processing approach to speech processing (cf. Kolinsky, 1998) distinguishes three levels, from bottom to top: perception, recognition (which involves activation of stored knowledge) and formal explicit analysis or comparison (which belongs to metalinguistic ability), and assumes that only the former is immune to literacy-dependent knowledge. In this contribution, we first briefly review the main ideas and evidence supporting the role of learning to read in the alphabetic system in the development of conscious representations of phonemes, and we contrast conscious and unconscious representations of phonemes. Then, we examine in detail recent compelling behavioral and neuroscientific evidence for the involvement of orthographic representation in the recognition of spoken words. We conclude by arguing that there is a strong need of theoretical re-elaboration of the models of speech recognition, which typically have ignored the influence of reading acquisition.