Assessing the role of orthography in speech perception and production: Evidence from picture–word interference tasks

The effects of orthographic and phonological relatedness between distractor word and object name in a picture–word interference task were investigated. In Experiment 1 distractors were presented visually, and consistent with previous findings, priming effects arising from phonological overlap were modulated by the presence or absence of orthographic similarity between distractor and picture name. This pattern is interpreted as providing evidence for cascaded processing in visual word recognition. In Experiment 2 distractors were presented auditorily, and here priming was not affected by orthographic match or mismatch. These findings provide no evidence for orthographic effects in speech perception and production, contrary to a number of previous reports.