Orthographic–phonological links in the lexicon: When lexical and sublexical information conflict

Abstract

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in the lexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc.? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic hanja and alphabetic/syllabic hangul, on a task where judgments must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Three experiments are reported that used a "homophone decision task" and manipulated the sublexical relationship between orthography and phonology in hanja and hangul, as well as the lexical status of the stimuli. For both hanja and hangul word targets, subjects showed a high error rate in correctly judging that there was another word identically pronounced with it when sublexical information was non-supportive of whole-word homophony. It is concluded that the process of making a homophone decision reflects the relationship between orthography and phonology as mediated through sublexical units activated from orthography to phonology and vice versa (called "Orthography-Phonology-Orthography Rebound" or "OPO Rebound"). The results are explained and discussed within a multilevel interactive activation model with orthographic units linked to phonological units at each level.

Are onsets and codas important in processing letter position? A comparison of TL effects in English and Korean

“…As it happens, though, this was not the case for any of the other C-O items. In Korean, the pronunciation of a coda often assimilates to the pronunciation of the onset that follows it within a word (see e.g., Kim, Taft, & Davis, 2004), which means that the pronunciation of at least one of those consonants is modified when their positions are exchanged. As an example, syllable-final is canonically pronounced /g/, but is nasalized to becomes /N/ when followed by the onset (''l").…”

Two distinct parsing stages in nonword reading aloud: Evidence from Russian

“…Although parsing has been researched throughout the last decades (e.g., Bowey, 1990;Marinus & de Jong, 2011;Perry, 2013;Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986;Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, & Ziegler, 1998;Rey, Ziegler, & Jacobs, 2000), open questions remain about the exact mechanisms that underlie the parsing procedure. The question of the nature of the units that are important for the sublexical system has received a lot of attention (e.g., Kim, Taft, & Davis, 2004;Perry, 2013;Schmalz et al, 2014). Several studies have shown the importance of graphemes, where a grapheme is defined as the letter or letter cluster that corresponds to a single phoneme (Marinus & de Jong, 2011;Rey et al, 1998Rey et al, , 2000.…”

The role of lexical expertise in reading homophones

“…In Experiment 2, participants were asked to detect whether individually and visually presented words were homophones (Kim, Taft, & Davis, 2004;Taft, 1984). This task requires activating a phonological representation from print, then determining whether there is a connection from the phonological representation to an orthographic representation other than the one for the presented word.…”