Do we read what we hear? Modeling orthographic influences on spoken word recognition

AbstractTheories and models of spoken word recognition aim to explain the process of accessing lexical knowledge given an acoustic realization of a word form. There is consensus that phonological and semantic information is crucial for this process. However, there is accumulating evidence that orthographic information could also have an impact on auditory word recognition. This paper presents two models of spoken word recognition that instantiate different hypotheses regarding the influence of orthography on this process. We show that these models reproduce human-like behavior in different ways and provide testable hypotheses for future research on the source of orthographic effects in spoken word recognition.