Interference between surface form and abstract representation in spoken word perception

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of an abstract code (orthographic and/or morphophonemic) on the perception of the sounds in French spoken words. For this purpose, we used words whose surface phonology was not congruent either with both orthographic and morphophonemic codes or with orthographic code alone. Experiment 1 showed that the processing of spoken word is affected by an underlying abstract code, which is presumably orthographic and/or morphophonemic. Experiment 2 examined the role of orthography alone, and showed that the sole orthographic code influenced spoken word processing. However, the effect obtained in Experiment 2 was smaller than that obtained Experiment 1. These data are interpreted in the framework of an interactive model of speech perception, where the written/abstract code and the phonetic code interact in both directions.