Phonological-orthographic consistency for Japanese words and its impact on visual and auditory word recognition

In most models of word processing, the degrees of consistency in the mappings between orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations are hypothesized to affect reading time. Following Hino, Miyamura, and Lupker's (2011) examination of the orthographic-phonological (O-P) and orthographic-semantic (O-S) consistency for 1,114 Japanese words (339 katakana and 775 kanji words), in the present research, we initially attempted to measure the phonological-orthographic (P-O) consistency for those same words. In contrast to the O-P and O-S consistencies, which were equivalent for kanji and katakana words, the P-O relationships were much more inconsistent for the kanji words than for the katakana words. The impact of kanji words' P-O consistency was then examined in both visual and auditory word recognition tasks. Although there was no effect of P-O consistency in the standard visual lexical-decision task, significant effects were detected in a lexical-decision task with auditory stimuli, in a perceptual identification task using masked visual stimuli, and in a lexical-decision task with degraded visual stimuli. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the impact of P-O consistency in auditory and visual word recognition.