THE BASIS OF CONSISTENCY EFFECTS IN WORD NAMING

Spelling-sound consistency effects have played an important role in recent theories of word recognition and naming. However, these effects have not proven to be robust, calling into question whether mechanisms that deal with consistency effects must be incorporated into theories of naming. We describe four experiments in which words with inconsistent spelling-sound correspondences yielded longer naming latencies than words with consistent correspondences. The studies also examined the computational basis of these effects; they depend on the degree of consistency, which is mainly determined by the properties of a word's neighborhood, specifically the relative frequencies of "friends" and "enemies." Consistency effects did not occur with the lexical decision task, suggesting that they are genuinely phonological effects. The results are interpreted within current models of naming in which both frequency and consistency of spelling-sound correspondences affect performance. © 1990.