Mental representations of the syllable internal structure are influenced by orthography

Seven experiments run in Portuguese examined the role of orthography in ble nding phonologically defined CVC syllables written either with a final mute "e'' (orthographic disyllables) or with a final consonant (orthographic mo nosyllables). Participants clearly relied on the spelling of the words (Exp eriment 1): the preferred blend was C/VC for words spelled with a final con sonant but CV/C for words spelled with a final mute "e''. The CV/C preferen ce for mute-e-words was observed even when instructions emphasised the impo rtance of their "sounds'' (Experiment 5) and even when the two materials sh ared exactly the same rimes (Experiment 6). The blending pattern for pseudo -words shows that participants relied on the spelling of pseudo-words' neig hbours (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the influence of orthography was observ ed for pseudo-words and homophonic words, depending on the spelling of cont extual words (Experiments 3 and 4): the C/VC segmentation of pseudo-words a nd homophones was much more frequent in a context of words spelled CVC than in a context of mute-e-words. Finally, there was no substantial reduction of the spelling effect when crossing the acoustic portion of the rime betwe en stimuli (Experiment 7) allowed control of possible acoustic-phonetic eff ects. The whole pattern of results shows that our phonological judgements a bout the structure of the syllable are shaped by the links between phonolog y and orthography.