LEXOP: a lexical database providing orthography-phonology statistics for French monosyllabic words.

During the last 20 years, psycholinguistic research has identified many variables that influence reading and spelling processes. We describe a new computerized lexical database, LEXOP, which provides quantitative descriptors about the relations between orthography and phonology for French monosyllabic words. Three main classes of variables are considered: consistency of print-to-sound and sound-to-print associations, frequency of orthography-phonology correspondences, and word neighborhood characteristics.

Masked form priming in writing words from pictures: evidence for direct retrieval of orthographic codes.

Three experiments used the masked priming paradigm to investigate the role of orthographic and phonological information in written picture naming. In all the experiments, participants had to write the names of pictures as quickly as possible under three different priming conditions. Nonword primes could be: (1) phonologically and orthographically related to the picture name; (2) orthographically related as in (1) but phonologically related to a lesser degree than in (1); (3) orthographically and phonologically unrelated except for the first consonant (or consonant cluster). Orthographic priming effects were observed with a prime exposure duration of 34 ms (Experiments 1 and 2) and of 51 ms (Experiment 3). In none of the experiments, did homophony between primes and picture names yield an additional advantage. Taken together, these findings support the view of the direct retrieval of orthographic information through lexical access in written picture naming, and thus argue against the traditional view that the retrieval of orthographic codes of obligatorily mediated by phonology.

Phonological assembly in reading: lexical contribution leads to violation of graphophonological rules.

According to current models of reading, the phonological representation of a letter string could be generated by means of two different procedures. The first consists in the looking up or addressing of the phonological representation of the appropriate word in the mental lexicon. The second consists in the assignment of a phonological code to the various orthographic units that occur in the letter string and the assembly of them into a unitary phonological representation. However, the various models of phonological assembly differ in the nature of the knowledge that such assembly requires. On the one hand, dual-route theories assert that the assembly process operates by means of extralexical graphophonological rules and, therefore, without reference to lexical knowledge. On the other hand, in analogy theories and interactive models of phonological assembly, the lexical phonological representations of words orthographically close to the letter string (the orthographic neighborhood) are supposed to contribute to the translation process. The aim of the experiments reported here was to empirically distinguish between these two categories of models. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to pronounce pseudowords containing the letter g. Results indicate that the phonological representation assigned to the letter g depends on the pronunciation favored by the lexical neighbors. Experiment 2 shows that lexical contribution to phonological assembly also takes place in lexical decision.