Orthographic effects on the attention to phonetic cues1

This paper presents experimental data that attempts to tie together two different phenomena. First, there is strong evidence that phonemic awareness is strongly influenced by one's writing system such that learning an alphabetic writing system focuses attention on the segment as a unit separate from other larger units, such as syllables. This phenomena may be related to the Developmental Weight Shift hypothesis (Nittrouer, 1996) where English learning children switch from relying on dynamic formant transitions to static frication noise in sibilant identification. This could be accounted for as a shift to phonemic processing brought on by learning to read and write English. This paper presents data from experiments with adult nativespeakers of English demonstrating that attention to sibilant cues can be directed orthographically to attend to different cues, depending on the symbol set used. The ramifications of sub-segmental orthographic effects on theories of speech perception and subject population is discussed. 1 Thanks go to Meghan Sumner for initially suggesting I follow up on the orthographic possibilities initially found in my dissertation. Thanks also to the Phonology Laboratory at UC Berkeley for access to their facilities for part of this research. Thanks also go to Angela Aiello, Devin Tankersley, and Lauren Winens for assistance with subject running. A portion of this research was funded by Keith Johnson's NIDCD Grant #R01 DC004421.