THE EFFECT OF SPELLING-TO-SOUND REGULARITY ON NAMING IN FRENCH

In two experiments the naming task was used to investigate the effect of spelling-to-sound regularity on performance for French words varying in frequency of usage. In both experiments the results showed a significant effect of regularity on naming latencies. Contrary to what has been found in previous experiments using English stimuli, the regularity effect did not vary as a function of word frequency. However, in both experiments significantly more errors, and specifically regularisation errors, were observed with low-frequency irregular words. Several possible interpretations of this atypical pattern of results are discussed. An additional observation was that the regularity effect, both on naming latencies and on error rates, and independently of frequency of use, was limited to the irregular words in which the idiosyncratic orthographic segment was either in initial or in medial position in the word. © 1991 Springer-Verlag 1991.