Orthographic influences on initial phoneme addition and deletion tasks: the effect of lexical status

Here a study is conducted to examine orthographic effects on initial phoneme addition and deletion tasks with an adult population. The results of a previous study [1] with children suggest that the use of an orthographic strategy depends on lexical status, so two experiments were conducted, one with real words and the other with nonwords. In both experiments, some items were amenable to both an orthographic and phonological strategy, but the orthographic representations of the other items interfered with production of the correct response. Longer reaction times were found for interfering items in the real word tasks, but not in the nonword tasks. This result lends support to the idea that lexical access involves the automatic orthographic activation.