Phonetic recoding of phonologically ambiguous printed words.

Abstract

Speech detection and matching simultaneously presented printed and spoken words were used to examine phonologic and phonetic processing of Hebrew heterophonic homographs. Subjects detected a correspondence between an ambiguous letter string and the amplitude envelopes of both dominant and subordinate phonological alternatives. Similar effects were obtained when the homographs were phonologically disambiguated by adding vowel marks. The matching of the unpointed printed forms of heterophonic homographs to the dominant and subordinate spoken alternatives presented auditorily was as fast as matching the pointed unambiguous forms to the respective spoken words. This outcome was not obtained when print and speech were not presented simultaneously. These results suggest that printed heterophonic homographs activate the two spoken alternatives they represent and provide further confirmation for fast phonetic recoding in reading.

Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese two-character words.

“…Thus, the prediction is that the activation of characters' phonology will result in a character-level phonological ambiguity or consistency effect. Previous studies with heterophonic homographs in English (e.g., Kroll & Schweickert, 1978), Serbo-Croatian (Frost, Feldman, & Katz, 1990), and Hebrew (Frost & Kampf, 1993) have demonstrated the effects of phonological ambiguity in recognition.…”

Prelexical and postlexical strategies in reading: Evidence from a deep and a shallow orthography.

“…Recently, Frost and Bentin (1992a) showed that phonologic analysis of printed heterophonic homographs in the even deeper unpointed Hebrew orthography precedes semantic disambiguation. In another study, Frost and Kampf (1993) showed that the two phonologic alternatives of Hebrew heterophonic homographs are automatically activated following the presentation of the ambiguous letter string.…”

Phonological computation and missing vowels: Mapping lexical involvement in reading.

“…The aim of Experiment 3 was to map the effect of DFs on lexical decision for pointed and unpointed words. Previous studies have shown that lexical decisions in Hebrew are based on the recognition of the orthographic structure and are made prior to a complete phonological analysis of the printed word Frost & Bentin, 1992b;Frost & Kampf, 1993;Frost, 1994). If lexical decisions do not involve a deep phonological analysis of the printed word, then DFs should not affect decision latencies for both pointed and unpointed words.…”