Phonology and orthography in reading aloud

Abstract

460Visual word recognition comprises the processes involved in identifying a word-for instance, during reading (see, e.g., Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). One important theoretical issue in visual word recognition concerns the role of phonology (see Frost, 1998, for a review). In principle, the orthographic representation could be enough to recognize visually presented words. However, it has been shown that the phonology of words also has a considerable impact on visual word recognition. For instance, Yates, Locker, and Simpson (2004) showed that phonological neighborhood influenced visual word perception (see also Mulatti, Reynolds, & Besner, 2006). In a visual lexical decision task, participants responded more rapidly and accurately to words with larger phonological neighborhoods than to those with smaller neighborhoods. Presumably, words with many phonological neighbors lead to a stronger pattern of activation at the phonological level than words with fewer neighbors. This activation pattern is an indication for the word recognition system that a letter string is a word, thus allowing faster responses. Yates et al. (2004) concluded that their results demonstrate the importance of phonological codes when processing letter strings. Yates (2005) replicated these findings using the naming and semantic categorization tasks.Similarly, Perfetti, Bell, and Delaney (1988)-using a backward visual masking procedure-demonstrated a higher target word (e.g., phase) identification accuracy when the backward mask was homophonic with the target (e.g., fayze) than when it was a graphemic mask (e.g., farne) or a control mask (e.g., compt). Perfetti et al. (1988) suggested that phonological information of words is quickly activated during reading and assists visual word identification in an early stage. This early role of phonology in visual word recognition was supported by another study of Perfetti and Bell (1991) showing that phonological priming effects reflect phonemic activation of the target words within 45 msec of prime exposure duration. Ferrand and Grainger (1992, 1993 extended these results in a systematic time course study of visual word recognition using masked priming. They demonstrated orthographic priming effects with prime exposure durations as short as 17 msec in lexical decision. Phonological priming started to emerge around 50 msec, which corresponds to the results reported by Perfetti and colleagues that were mentioned previously. Grainger (1992, 1993) developed an interactive activation model of word recognition in which orthographic information is fed directly into the lexicon and into phonological representations. These phonological representations can also feed into the lexicon (word level). However, phonological priming effects are mediated by orthographic representations. Therefore, this model predicts that effects of pseudohomophone primes (e.g., mert) that have orthographic overlap with a target (e.g., mere) should appear earlier than the effects of pseudohomophones with less ...

Reading aloud in Persian: ERP evidence for an early locus of the masked onset priming effect

“…powder -CARPET). This effect has been replicated in English (Kinoshita, 2000(Kinoshita, , 2003Kinoshita & Woollams, 2002;Malouf & Kinoshita, 2007), Dutch (Schiller, 2004(Schiller, , 2007(Schiller, , 2008, French (Carreiras, Ferrand, Grainger, & Perea, 2005;Grainger & Ferrand, 1996), and Spanish (Carreiras, Perea, Vergara, & Pollatsek, 2009;Dimitropoulou, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2010). There is evidence that the MOPE is due to phonological (e.g.…”

“…circus [sırkəs] -CARPET [kɑrpət]; e.g. Mousikou, Coltheart, & Saunders, 2010;Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006;Schiller, 2007;Timmer & Schiller, submitted).…”

Effects of Orthography on Speech Production in Chinese

“…This finding highlights the importance of phonological representation for visual word recognition, while suggesting that orthography plays a rather limited role in reading Dutch words aloud. Schiller (2007) further suggests that no orthographic effect might be a result of the shallow orthography in Dutch, with a relatively clear correspondence between graphemes and phonemes.…”

“…The mapping between orthography and phonology is more transparent in Dutch than in English (Seymour et al 2003), hence Roelofs (2006) and Schiller (2007) raised the possibility that the differences among studies might arise from deviations in transparency between the languages in which the experiments were conducted. This hypothesis predicts that the deeper of the correspondence between orthography and phonology of a language, the more prone to find the orthographic activation in a language's speech production, especially when orthography is relevant for the speech production task at hand.…”

“…With a picture-word interference task, pervious study demonstrated that there exists pure orthographic activation with visually presented distractors in Chinese speech production, although it is not necessary to activate orthographic information for spoken naming ). According to Roelofs (2006) and Schiller (2007)'s hypothesis, it is hence possible that studies conducted on Chinese speakers are particularly likely to reveal an automatic orthographic effect in spoken word production.…”