STATISTICAL-ANALYSIS OF THE BIDIRECTIONAL INCONSISTENCY OF SPELLING AND SOUND IN FRENCH

Recent studies suggest that performance attendant on visual ward perce ption is affected not only by the ''traditional'' feedforward inconsis tency (spelling --> phonology) but also by its feedback inconsistency (phonology --> spelling). The present study presents a statistical ana lysis of the bidirectional inconsistency for all French monosyllabic w ords. We show that French is relatively consistent from spelling to ph onology but highly inconsistent from phonology to spelling. Appendixes B and C list prior and conditional probabilities for all inconsistent mappings and thus provide a valuable tool for controlling, selecting, and constructing stimulus materials for psycholinguistic and neuropsy chological research. Such large-scale statistical analyses about a lan guage's structure are crucial for developing metrics of inconsistency, generating hypotheses for cross-linguistic research, and building com putational models of reading.