Effects of orthographic consistency on spoken word recognition and production in L1-Spanish children

Learning to read reshapes spoken language processing by establishing systematic mappings between phonemes and graphemes. One robust manifestation of this interaction is the Orthographic Consistency Effect (OCE), whereby spoken words containing phonemes with a single possible spelling (consistent spellings) are processed more efficiently than those with multiple possible spellings (inconsistent spellings). The present study investigates whether early L1-Spanish readers show phoneme-level OCEs in spoken word perception and production. L1-Spanish second graders of around seven years of age completed three tasks: an auditory lexical decision task, a picture naming task, and a reading aloud task. Stimuli could contain either consistent phonemes or inconsistent phonemes. Results revealed OCEs in both perception and production. In the auditory lexical decision task, children responded more accurately to items with consistent than inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme mappings. In reading aloud, consistent items were named both faster and more accurately than inconsistent items. In contrast, no consistency effects were observed in picture naming, a task that does not overtly involve orthographic input. These findings demonstrate that, even in a highly transparent orthography, early readers are sensitive to phoneme-level orthographic inconsistencies during spoken word recognition and production. L1-Spanish early readers appear to rely on phonological decoding strategically, suggesting that the impact of literacy on speech perception and production in Spanish is present but task-dependent at the onset of reading acquisition.