Spelling-sound typicality only affects words with digraphs: Further qualifications to the generality of the regularity effect on word naming

Two experiments investigated naming performance for items with and without digraphs. Both experiments compared performance for Regular Consistent, Regular Inconsistent and Exception words. Experiment 1 also compared nonwords with Non-Existent Bodies to those with existing Consistent and Inconsistent Bodies. Naming was slower for nonwords containing digraphs and for nonwords constructed from Non-Existent bodies. In both experiments, the naming latency data for words showed effects of spelling-sound typicality only for words with digraphs; the speed of naming words without digraphs was not affected by either regularity or consistency. The complete set of results could not be effectively simulated by either the Dual-Route Cascaded model or by Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson's (1996) Parallel Distributed Processing models. The absence of effects of spelling-sound typicality for words without digraphs qualifies a phenomenon that has been regarded as one of the central facts of visual word recognition and provides strong constraints on the future development of computational models of lexical retrieval.