Orthographic influences on phoneme deletion response times.

The aim of this paper is to provide further evidence that orthography plays a central role in phonemic awareness, by demonstrating an orthographic congruency effect in phoneme deletion. In four initial phoneme deletion experiments, adult participants produced the correct response more slowly with orthographically mismatched stimulus-response pairs (e.g., worth-earth) than with matched pairs (e.g., wage-age). This orthographic effect occurred with or without specific instructions to ignore spelling and when stimuli were presented with or without the to-be-deleted sound. In a final experiment, participants made more errors on complex than simple onset items, but there was no interaction with orthographic mismatch. The repeated observation of this robust orthographic effect suggests that participants are at least aware of orthography during phonemic awareness tasks, and it supports the view that phonemic awareness is directly subserved by orthography.

The delayed trigger voice key: an improved analogue voice key for psycholinguistic research.

Many researchers rely on analogue voice keys for psycholinguistic research. However, the triggering of traditional simple threshold voice keys (STVKs) is delayed after response onset, and the delay duration may vary depending on initial phoneme type. The delayed trigger voice key (DTVK), a stand-alone electronic device that incorporates an additional minimum signal duration parameter, is described and validated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, recorded responses from a nonword naming task were presented to the DTVK and an STVK. As compared with hand-coded reaction times from visual inspection of the waveform, the DTVK was more accurate than the STVK, overall and across initial phoneme type. Rastle and Davis (2002) showed that an STVK more accurately detected an initial [s] when it was followed by a vowel than when followed by a consonant. Participants' responses from that study were presented to the DTVK in Experiment 2, and accuracy was equivalent for initial [s] in vowel and consonant contexts. Details for the construction of the DTVK are provided.