Mentor(s): So Young Lee

Native English speakers - despite utilizing the language effortlessly - have tendencies to represent orthography (spelling) and phonemes (sounds) as a one to one relationship (Bürki et al., 2012; Treiman et al., 1994). In this study, 32 native English speakers listened to a phoneme and evaluated which words from a list contained the phoneme. Despite accurately using these phonemes as native speakers, participants often made errors on the test, favoring spelling cues to discern the phoneme more than what was presented auditorily. This suggests English speakers rely more on spelling than auditory perception to represent phonemes on a conscious level.

Explore the Project