The Feedback Consistency Effect in Lexical Decision and Naming

Abstract

Previous consistency research investigated inconsistency only in the mapping of spelling to phonology (feedforward inconsistency). The present experiments investigated whether inconsistency in the mapping of phonology to spelling (feedback inconsistency) would also affect visual word perception. In Experiment 1, we replicated the basic feedback consistency effect previously obtained by Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) in a lexical-decision task. Lexical-decision latencies and errors were increased when a word's phonological rhyme could be spelled in multiple ways. In Experiment 2, we showed that both feedforward and feedback consistency affected lexical-decision performance to the same extent. In Experiment 3, feedback consistency effects persisted in immediate naming, but they were smaller and less reliable than feedforward consistency effects. A portion of the feedforward consistency effects persisted in delayed naming. Our results suggest that a part of both feedforward and feedback consistency effects seem to be modulated by task specific properties (e.g., spelling check in lexical decision or ease of generating articulatory programs in naming). However, another part seems to uncover a task-independent basic principle underlying word perception: the bidirectional coupling of orthography and phonology.