Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated the effects of spelling knowledge on the representationof spoken language. In the experiment, subjects first saw the written form ofa nonsense word, then heard it and judged the number of syllables. For theidentical acoustic tokens, the number of judged syllables varied with theaccoitpanying spelling. The effect of spelling was stronger for one syllablepronunciations than for two syllable pronunciations. The results arediscussed in relation to the role of spelling knowledge in listeners'representations of phonology.