Orthography influences the perception and production of speech.

One intriguing question in language research concerns the extent to which orthographic information impacts on spoken word processing. Previous research has faced a number of methodological difficulties and has not reached a definitive conclusion. Our research addresses these difficulties by capitalizing on recent developments in the area of word learning. Participants were trained to criterion on a set of associations between novel pictures and novel spoken words. Spelling-sound consistent or spelling-sound inconsistent spellings were introduced on the 2nd day, and the influence of these spellings on speech processing was assessed on the 3rd day. Results showed significant orthographic effects on speech perception and speech production in a situation in which spelling-sound consistency was manipulated with perfect experimental control. Results are discussed in terms of a highly interactive language system in which there is a rapid and automatic flow of activation in both directions between orthographic and phonological representations.

The influence of synchronous audiovisual distractors on audiovisual temporal order judgments.

Participants made unspeeded temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding which occurred first, anauditory or a visual target stimulus, when they were presented at a variety of different stimulus onset asynchronies. The target stimuli were presented either in isolation or positioned randomly among a stream of three synchronous audiovisual distractors. The largest just noticeable differences were reported when the targets were presented in the middle of the distractor stream. When the targets were presented at the beginning of the stream, performance was no worse than when the audiovisual targets were presented in isolation. Subsequent experiments revealed that performance improved somewhat when the position of the target was fixed or when the target was made physically distinctive from the distractors. These results show that audiovisual TOJs are impaired by the presence of audiovisual distractors and that this cost can be ameliorated by directing attention to the appropriate temporal position within the stimulus stream.