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Literacy changes the way the brain processes spoken language. Most psycholinguists believe that orthographic effects on spoken language are either strategic or restricted to meta-phonological tasks. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the locus and the time course of orthographic effects on spoken word recognition in a semantic task. Participants were asked to decide whether a given word belonged to a semantic category (body parts). On no-go trials, words were presented that were either orthographically consistent or inconsistent. Orthographic inconsistency (i.e., multiple spellings of the same phonology) could occur either in the first or the second syllable. The ERP data showed a clear orthographic consistency effect that preceded lexical access and semantic effects. Moreover, the onset of the orthographic consistency effect was time-locked to the arrival of the inconsistency in a …