Strategic reliance on phonological mediation in lexical access

The present study investigated strategic variation in reliance on phonological mediation in visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, semantically related or unrelated word primes preceded word, pseudohomophone (e.g.,trane), or nonpseudohomophone (e.g.,trank) targets in a lexical decision task. Semantic priming effects were found for words, and response latencies to pseudohomophones were longer in related than in unrelated prime conditions. In Experiment 2, related or unrelated word primes preceded word or pseudohomophone targets. A relatedness effect was found for words, although it was significant at a 600-msec prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and not at a 200-msec SOA. There was no relatedness effect for pseudohomophones. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2, except that pseudohomophones were replaced by nonpseudohomophonic orthographic controls. Facilitation effects for related target words were greater in Experiment 3 than in Experiment 2. The results reflect apparent variations in the expectation that a related prime reliably indicates that a target is a word. Although reliance on phonological mediation might be strategically contingent, there could be a brief time period in which phonologically mediated lexical access occurs automatically. Whether phonological information is maintained or suppressed subsequently depends on its overall usefulness for the task.     

Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.     

Testing the Role of Phonology in Reading: Focus on Sentence Processing

Most reading research investigating the role of phonology in word recognition has focused on studies employing an individual word as the sole stimulus. The bulk of such research has offered support for the phonological recoding hypothesis, the conjecture that access to a printed word’s meaning requires activation of the word’s phonology (i.e., meaning is not typically activated via orthography alone). A criticism of such studies is that by presenting participants with only a single word on each experimental trial (a nonecological manipulation), participants may alter their typical strategy of reading in such a way as to artificially favor the phonological recoding hypothesis. The present study avoided a focus on single words by requiring participants to read sentences and paragraphs for comprehension. Experiment 1 showed that, in reading a paragraph of connected sentences, eliminating a letter in a word that altered the phonology was more deleterious than eliminating a letter that did. Experiment 2 focused on the reading of each sentence itself rather than on the paragraph and provided additional control conditions. The results were similar to those of Experiment 1, consistent with the phonological recoding hypothesis.     

Children’s use of phonological encoding when reading for meaning

The role of phonological recoding in children’s reading was investigated by means of a task requiring comprehension of sentence meaning: The child’s task was to decide whether a sequence of printed letter strings was a meaningful sentence or not. Meaningless sentences that are meaningful when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran threw the street”) produced more incorrect responses than did meaningless sentences that remain meaningless when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran sew the street”). The difference in error rates between the two sentence types diminished as a function of age. Control experiments showed that these results were not due to visual similarity effects, nor to imperfect ability to spell homophones. It was concluded that very young readers rely extensively on phonological recoding when reading for meaning; as they grow older, reliance on visual encoding becomes progressively more important.     

Automatic semantic feedback during visual word recognition

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether semantic feedback spreads to orthographic and/or phonological representations during visual word recognition and whether such feedback occurs automatically. Three types of prime-target word pairs were used within the mediated-priming paradigm: (1) homophonically mediated (e.g., frog-[toad]-towed), (2) orthographically mediated (e.g., frog-[toad]-told), and (3) associatively related (e.g., frog-toad). Using both brief (53 msec; Experiment 1) and long (413 msec; Experiment 3) prime exposure durations, significant facilitatory-priming effects were found in the response time data with orthographically, but not homophonically, mediated prime-target word pairs. When the prime exposure duration was shortened to 33 msec in Experiment 4, however, facilitatory priming was absent with both orthographically and homophonically mediated word pairs. In addition, with a brief (53-msec) prime exposure duration, direct-priming effects were found with associatively (e.g., frog-toad), orthographically (e.g., toad-told), and homophonically (e.g., toad-towed) related word pairs in Experiment 2. Taken together, these results indicate that following the initial activation of semantic representations, activation automatically feeds back to orthographic, but not phonological, representations during the early stages of word processing. These findings were discussed in the context of current accounts of visual word recognition.     

Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition

Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphemic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically, and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data.     

Phonological processing and lexical access in aphasia

This study explored the relationship between on-line processing of phonological information and lexical access in aphasic patients. A lexical decision paradigm was used in which subjects were presented auditorily with pairs of words or word-like stimuli and were asked to make a lexical decision about the second stimulus in the pair. The initial phonemes of the first word primes, which were semantically related to the real word targets, were systematically changed by one or more than one phonetic feature, e.g., cat-dog, gat-dog, wat-dog. Each of these priming conditions was compared to an unrelated word baseline condition, e.g., nurse-dog. Previous work with normals showed that even a nonword stimulus receives a lexical interpretation if it shares a sufficient number of phonetic features with an actual word in the listener's lexicon. Results indicated a monotonically decreasing degree of facilitation as a function of phonological distortion. In contrast, fluent aphasics showed priming in all phonological distortion conditions relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nonfluent aphasics showed priming only in the undistorted, related word condition relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nevertheless, in a secondary task requiring patients to make a lexical decision on the nonword primes presented singly, all aphasics showed phonological feature sensitivity. These results suggest deficits for aphasic patients in the various processes contributing to lexical access, rather than impairments at the level of lexical organization or phonological organization.     

Phonological Activation in Multi-syllabic Sord Recognition

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English includes words incorporating a silent letter in their letter strings (e.g., champane). Such words provide an opportunity for investigating the role of phonological information in multi-syllabic words by comparing them to words that do not have the silent letter in the corresponding position (e.g., passener). The performance focus is on the effects of removing letters from words with a silent letter and from words with a non-silent letter. Three representative lexical tasks—naming, semantic categorization, lexical decision—were conducted in the present study. Stimuli that excluded a silent letter (e.g., champa_ne) were processed faster than those that excluded a sounding letter (e.g., passen_er) in the naming (Experiment 1), the semantic categorization (Experiment 2), and the lexical decision task (Experiment 3). The convergent evidence from these three experiments provides seminal proof of phonological recoding in multi-syllabic word recognition. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Phonological recoding in lexical decision: Effects of spelling-to-sound regularity depend on how regularity is defined

This study is concerned with two contrasting accounts of lexieal access in reading, phonological receding and direct access. Experiment I demonstrated that exception words that have a guide to their pronunciation listed in theOxford Paperback Dictionary (e.g., GAUGE) gave rise to longer lexical decision times than matched regular words (e.g., GRILL). Experiment 2 contrasted three types of words: exceptions that have dictionary-listed pronunciations, exceptions without listed pronunciations, and regular words. Lexieal decision responses to the first type were significantly longer than those produced to the other two types. Nonlisted exception words, however, did not differ from regular words. Experiment 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 2, using pronunciation speed as the dependent measure. Experiment 4 showed that the slower lexical decision times associated with dictionary-listed exception words remain when subjects are given speeded-response instructions. In contrast to earlier studies of a similar kind, these results indicate the existence of a phonological receding stage in reading. Furthermore, they suggest that the phonological recoding system is more flexible than was previously thought.     

Phonological encoding in the lexical decision task

In lexical decision experiments, subjects have difficulty in responding NO to non-words which are pronounced exactly like English words (e.g. BRANE). This does not necessarily imply that access to a lexical entry ever occurs via a phonological recoding of a visually-presented word. The phonological recoding procedure might be so slow that when the letter string presented is a word, access to its lexical entry via a visual representation is always achieved before phonological recoding is completed. If prelexical phonological recodings are produced by using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, such recodings can only occur for words which conform to these rules (regular words), since applications of the rules to words which do not conform to the rules (exception words) produce incorrect phonological representations. In two experiments, it was found that time to achieve lexical access (as measured by YES latency in a lexical decision task) was equivalent for regular words and exception words. It was concluded that access to lexical entries in lexical decision experiments of this sort does not proceed by sometimes or always phonologically recoding visually-presented words.     

Phonological processing during silent reading in aphasic patients

In a task involving the detection of a predesignated letter during the silent reading of a series of passages, left-brain-damaged aphasic patients and right-brain-damaged patients showed patterns of performance consistent with those of normal individuals. Both of the brain-damaged groups were more likely to detect letters when they were pronounced in a typical way (e.g., g in "ago") than in an atypical way (e.g., g in "through"), suggesting the use of phonological recoding during silent reading. In addition, both of these groups were more likely to detect letters when they occurred in content than in function words, suggesting a differential processing of these word types. Possible differences in the strategies predominantly relied on for phonological recoding and for the differential processing of content and function words by different groups of patients are discussed.     

Basic processes in reading: can functional phonological recoding be blocked?

A widely held view is that phonological processing is always involved in lexical access from print, and is automatic in that it cannot be prevented. This claim was assessed in the context of a priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, repetition priming was observed for both pseudohomophone-word pairs (e.g., brane-brain) and morphologically related word pairs (e.g., marked-mark) in the context of lexical decision. In Experiment 2, subjects searched the prime for the presence of a target letter and then made a lexical decision to a subsequent letter string. Phonological priming from a pseudohomophone was eliminated following letter search of the prime, whereas morphological priming persisted. These results are inconsistent with the claim that a) lexical access from print requires preliminary phonological processing, and b) functional phonological processing cannot be blocked. They are, however, consistent with the conclusion that, for intact skilled readers, lexical access can be accomplished on the basis of orthographic processing alone. These results join a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that there exist numerous points in visual word recognition at which processing can be stopped.     

From print to sound in mature readers as a function of reader ability and two forms of orthographic regularity

Four experiments using college students as subjects provide evidence that both highly skilled and less skilled mature readers derive the names of printed words from visual access of the lexicon rather than by phonological recoding. Regularity of pronunciation (regular vs. exception words) as a variable of orthographic regularity effectiveafter visual code formation had no effect either between or within reading ability groups. Less skilled readers made more errors and were slower than highly skilled readers on both types of words. Sing-letter spatial redundancy, as a variable of orthographic regularity that influences the formation of visual codes, served to differentiate the two groups only in naming nonwords. Highly skilled readers used spatial redundancy to offset the effect of array length, whereas less skilled readers did not. Except for high-frequency words, visual access and retrieval of the pronunciation of words was significantly faster for highly skilled readers. Less skilled readers were most disadvantaged in naming nonwords, a task that requires phonological recoding. Overall results support the hypothesis that reading ability in mature readers is related to the speed of word recognition. Highly skilled readers may make more use of variables of orthographic regularity effective in the formation of visual codes.     

PHONOLOGICAL RECODING OF MIXED-CASE WORDS IN THE PRIMING TASK

The successes of the phonological recoding hypothesis induced us naturally to question the role of orthographic information. Mixed-case words (e.g., tOwEd -> toad vs. tOlD -> toad) were used as a prime in the priming task in order to investigate the locus of an orthographic spelling check, based on the assumption of the phonological recoding hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that both normal-case prime and mixed-case prime produced significant phonological priming in a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) of the prime and the target. In contrast, Experiment 2, using a long SOA, showed that the mixed-case prime maintained the phonological priming, but the normal-case prime did not. These results indicated that the orthographic spelling check distinguished the normal-case and the mixed-case in a later stage of word recognition, not in an early stage.     

Phonology, lexical access in reading, and articulatory suppression: A critical review

Considerable confusion exists in the literature on visual word recognition and reading with respect to the effects of articulatory suppression upon phonological recoding. The authors of a large number of journal articles, chapters, cognitive psychology textbooks, and books devoted to reading processes have concluded that suppression interferes with phonological receding of print and have used this supposed fact as a basis for determining when phonology is involved in various reading tasks. Others have concluded that suppression need not interfere with phonological recoding (e.g. Besner, Davies and Daniels, 1981; Besner and Davelaar, 1982). The present review concludes that a phonological code can be derived from printed English and used for lexical access without interference from suppression. However, operations performed upon a phonological code—e.g. post-assembly phonemic segmentation and deletion, maintenance in working memory—are disrupted by suppression. A review of the literature supports this distinction; some implications of these views are noted.     

Semantic, phonological, and mediated priming in reading and lexical decisions

Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether semantic activation of a concept spreads to phonologically and graphemically related concepts. In lexical decision or self-paced reading tasks, subjects responded to pairs of words that were semantically related (e.g., light-lamp), that rhymed (e.g., lamp-damp), or that combined both of these relations through a mediating word (e.g., light-damp). In one version of each task, test lists contained word-word pairs (e.g., light-lamp) as well as nonword-word (e.g., pown-table) and word-nonword pairs (e.g., month-poad); in another version, test lists contained only word-word pairs. The lexical decision and self-paced reading tasks were facilitated by semantic and rhyming relations regardless of the presence or absence of nonwords on the test lists. The effect of the mediated relation, however, depended on the presence of nonwords among the stimuli. When only words were included, there was no effect of the mediated relation, but when nonwords were included, lexical decision and self-paced reading responses were inhibited by the mediated relation. These inhibitory effects are attributed to processes occurring after lexical access, and the relative advantages of the self-paced reading task are discussed.     

Semantic priming is affected by real-time phonological competition: Evidence for continuous cascading systems

Lexical-semantic access is affected by the phonological structure of the lexicon. What is less clear is whether such effects are the result of continuous activation between lexical form and semantic processing or whether they arise from a more modular system in which the timing of accessing lexical form determines the timing of semantic activation. This study examined this issue using the visual world paradigm by investigating the time course of semantic priming as a function of the number of phonological competitors. Critical trials consisted of high or low density auditory targets (e.g., horse) and a visual display containing a target, a semantically related object (e.g., saddle), and two phonologically and semantically unrelated objects (e.g., chimney, bikini). Results showed greater magnitude of priming for semantically related objects of low than of high density words, and no differences for high and low density word targets in the time course of looks to the word semantically related to the target. This pattern of results is consistent with models of cascading activation, which predict that lexical activation has continuous effects on the level of semantic activation, with no delays in the onset of semantic activation for phonologically competing words.     

Phonological priming and orthographic analogies in reading

Recent work has demonstrated that children can use orthographic analogies between the spelling patterns in words to help in decoding new words (e.g., using beak to read peak; Goswami, 1986, 1988). However, one objection has been that these analogy effects may be due to phonological priming. Two experiments examined the phonological priming alternative. In Experiment 1, a single word reading task compared the use of analogies to read words that shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., most-post), that shared orthography only (e.g., most-cost), or that shared phonology only (e.g. most-toast--the phonological priming condition). Limited effects of phonological priming were found. Experiment 2 then presented the same words embedded in prose passages--"real reading." While the orthographic analogy effect remained robust, the small phonological priming effect disappeared. It is argued that phonological priming is an insufficient explanation of the analogy effect at the single word level, and plays no role in the use of analogies in story reading.