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. In the present series of experiments, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the locus and the time course of orthographic effects on spoken word recognition in a variety of tasks: lexical decision, semantic categorization and phonological priming. Overall, the ERP data showed a clear orthographic effect on spoken language that typically 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 spoken word, which suggests that orthography influences spoken language in a time-dependent manner. In sum then, the existence of an orthographic effect on spoken language suggest that cross-modal integration of written and spoken language is a powerful mechanism even in tasks that do not explicitly require such integration to occur.