Is perception a two-way street? The case of feedback consistency in visual word recognition

It is generally assumed that during reading, the activation produced over orthographic units feeds forward to phonological units. Supporting interactive models of word recognition, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) recently claimed that phonological activation reverberates to orthographic processing units and consequently constrains orthographic encoding. They found that the consistency of the relations between phonology and orthography (feedback consistency) influenced lexical decision performance. We explored the effect in five experiments conducted with French words. Although feedback consistency affected writing performance, no significant effect was observed in lexical decision even when inconsistency was defined so as to maximize the effect. We also show that previous reports of consistency effects in French (Ziegler, Montant, & Jacobs, 1997a) may be due to a confound between consistency and word frequency, as assessed by subjective frequency estimates. We conclude that there is at present little evidence that sound-to-print consistency influences orthographic encoding in visual word recognition, (C) 1998 Academic Press.