Does Spelling Affect Phoneme Perception?

Native English speakers - despite utilizing the language effortlessly - have tendencies to represent orthography (spelling) and phonemes (sounds) as a one to one relationship (Bürki et al., 2012; Treiman et al., 1994). In this study, 32 native English speakers listened to a phoneme and evaluated which words from a list contained the phoneme. Despite accurately using these phonemes as native speakers, participants often made errors on the test, favoring spelling cues to discern the phoneme more than what was presented auditorily. This suggests English speakers rely more on spelling than auditory perception to represent phonemes on a conscious level.

Research Questions

Does spelling influence phoneme perception in native English speakers?

Methods

The participants consisted of 32 native English speakers varying in gender and age (18-72 years old). The stimuli were selected to represent the following phonemic parameters: voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. The goal was to find examples of words where one letter (or spelling) could represent two phonemes that differed in one of the aforementioned parameters (e.g. voiced vs unvoiced). Each question contained an audio of the phoneme and instructions stating "Please listen to the audio and and select all word(s) that contain this sound." Below the audio was a list of options that always provided (1) a word that contained the phoneme (2) a word that did not contain the phoneme but mimicked the same letter (or spelling) as the correct response and (3) six distractor words that lacked the phoneme and the related spelling. Participants were presented with 8 targets and 28 filler questions. Qualtrics was used to conduct the experiment. Data was analyzed using Google Sheets.

Results/Findings and Discussion

Data was analyzed based on participants' correctness in their responses (i.e. selecting only the word that contained the phoneme from the audio and no others). Among the incorrect responses, it was examined whether or not this was due to a spelling effect (i.e. people selected both words that shared a spelling despite only one of these being correct). Incorrect answers that were not attributed to the spelling effect were reasoned to be from misheard audios or lack of attention during the test. Across all target items 58% of participants answered incorrectly, with 79% of the responses being due to the spelling effect. Looking at specific parameters, voicing had the strongest effect, with 73% of participants answering incorrectly and spelling effect being the cause 86% of the time. Place of articulation had the weakest effect with 36% of people answering incorrectly and spelling effect being the cause 48% of the time. Even with the weakest parameter, people answered incorrectly more often than one would expect with the spelling effect being a noteable cause.

Conclusions and Future Study

While native English speakers speak and listen to the language with next to no effort, there appears to be a one-to-one relationship that they enforce between spelling and phonemes even though this rule often contains errors. It is intriguing to note the parameter of voicing was the most challenging as participants often answered these questions incorrectly. Future research exploring the reasoning behind the differences in these paramters can be explored.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Language & Computation Lab headed by professor of linguistics Dr. So Young Lee.

References

Bürki, A., Spinelli, E., Gaskell, M. (2012). A written word is worth a thousand spoken words: The influence of spelling on spoken-word production. Journal of Memory and Language, 67(4), 449-467. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.001

Treiman, R., Cassar, M., & Zukowski, A. (1994). What Types of Linguistic Information Do Children Use in Spelling? The Case of Flaps. Child Development, 65(5), 1318–1337. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131501

NACE Career Readiness Competencies

Career + Self-Development: As a curious student, I have been privileged with the opportunity to explore the process of conducting research in my field of study and have a stronger sense of what interests me personally and career wise.
Communication: I worked closely with my mentor weekly, blending my interests and her expertise to successfully conduct the experiment. I clearly communicated with participants so that they could successfully complete the experiment.
Technology: I used a variety of online tools such as Qualtrics to create the experiment and Praat to record the audio files. I used Google Sheets to analyze the data and visualize it through graphs.

Research Compliance Protocols

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) - 05290e.

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