Statistical analysis of the bidirectional inconsistency of spelling and sound in french

Recent studies suggest that performance attendant on visual word perception is affected not only bythe "traditional" feedforward inconsistency (spelling ---7phonology) but also by its feedback incon- sistency (phonology ---7spelling). The present study presents a statistical analysis of the bidirectional inconsistency for all French monosyllabic words. Weshow that French is relatively consistent from spelling to phonology but highlyinconsistent from phonology to spelling. Appendixes Band Clist prior and conditional probabilities for all inconsistent mappings and thus provide a valuable tool for con- trolling, selecting, and constructing stimulus materials for psycholinguistic and neuropsychological research. Such large-scale statistical analyses about a language's structure are crucial for develop- ing metrics of inconsistency, generating hypotheses for cross-linguistic research, and building com- putational models of reading. When