Brief Report The developmental turnpoint of orthographic consistency eﬀects in speech recognition Paulo Ventura a, * , Re ´gine Kolinsky b,c , Chotiga Pattamadilok b,c , Jose ´ Morais b a Faculdade de Psicologia e de Cie ˆncias da Educac ßa ˜o, Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-013 Lisboa, Portugal b Universite ´ Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), BE-1050 Brussels, Belgium c Fonds de la Recherche Scientiﬁque (FNRS), BE-1000 Brussels, Belgium Received 2 July 2007; revised 7 January 2008 Available online 6 March 2008 Abstract The inﬂuence of orthography on children’s online auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 4 to the end of Grade 9 by examining the orthographic consistency eﬀect in audi- tory lexical decision. Fourth-graders showed evidence of a widespread inﬂuence of orthography in their spoken word recognition system; words with rimes that can be spelled in two diﬀerent ways (inconsistent) produced longer auditory lexical decision times and more errors than did consistent words. A similar consistency eﬀect was also observed on pseudowords. With adult listeners, on exactly the same material, we replicated the usual pattern of an orthographic consistency eﬀect restricted to words in lexical decision. From Grade 6 onward, this adult pattern of orthographic eﬀect on spoken recognition is already observable. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Auditory word recognition; Orthographic consistency eﬀect; Reading acquisition; Phonological de- coding Introduction Traditionally, spoken language processing was considered as independent of spelling knowledge; traditional spoken word recognition models deny a role of orthography 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2008.01.003 * Corresponding author. Fax: +351 217933408. E-mail address: paulo.ventura@fpce.ul.pt (P. Ventura). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 100 (2008) 135–145 www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp