Suppressing Inner Speech in ESL Reading: Implications for Developmental Changes in Second Language Word Recognition Processes

Abstract

The effect of articulatory suppression on second language (L2) visual sentence comprehension and its relation to L2 reading proficiency and lower level processing efficiency were investigated in a series of experiments using 64 college-level Japanese English as a second language learners as participants. The results supported the hypothesis that increased reading proficiency requires developmental changes in lower level skills; namely a greater degree of L2 reading proficiency requires greater orthographic processing skills. This is especially pronounced for the groups comprising proficient and less proficient readers. With regard to proficient readers, there were significant intercorrelations among sentence processing performance under suppression, reading comprehension score, and orthographic skills; however, none of these relationships were significant with less proficient readers. In contrast, phonological processing continued to make a significant contribution with proficient readers under suppression. This confounding outcome implies that a simple choice between phonological and direct-visual coding strategies does not fully explain the L2 reading process under articulatory suppression.RESEARCH ON FIRST LANGUAGE (L1) reading has produced a wide variety of evidence suggesting the crucial contribution of phonological processing-recognizing a word's phonological information on the basis of letter-sound correspondences-in the acquisition of reading In response to these empirical findings, a growing number of second language (L2) researchers have focused on the magnitude of the contribution of these two coding processes on L2 reading performance. One such study is Haynes and Carr (1990), which compared the level of awareness between L2 and L1 readers with respect to orthographic regularity for English. They observed the performance of Taiwanese learners of English and native speakers of English in matching real English words, pseudo-English words (orthographically legal letter strings), and nonwords (orthographically illegal letter strings). Their findings suggest that the performance of proficient L2 learners is closer to that of native speakers than is the performance of

L2 Reading Comprehension and Its Correlates: A Meta‐Analysis

“…Upon finding this result, we carefully reexamined the individual study features and associated effect sizes in our sample in order to identify a pattern that was not captured by the moderator analyses, but that could be potentially important. Indeed, one such pattern emerged when we simultaneously considered age and L1‐L2 distance; among the adult L2 samples of nonalphabetic L1 backgrounds (2 Chinese samples and 2 Japanese samples), the correlations between decoding and L2 reading comprehension were as follows: .28 in Kato (), .31 in Jiang, Sawaki, and Sabatini (), .38 in Koda (), and .55 in Shiotsu (). Most of these adult participants studied English as a foreign language in their respective country although some of them were studying English abroad at the time of the study.…”

“…Due to its close association with phonological processing and decoding, the majority of L2 reading studies have opted for investigating phonological knowledge or decoding alone without also including orthographic knowledge. Recent L2 reading research, however, started using test tasks that uniquely tap into orthographic knowledge (e.g., judging whether the spelling of a nonword conforms to the English orthographic conventions as in Nassaji & Geva, ) and indicated that orthographic knowledge has a unique contribution as a reading predictor distinct from phonological knowledge or processing; orthographic knowledge has been found a stronger predictor of L2 reading abilities among higher proficiency readers (Kato, ; Nassaji, ; Nassaji & Geva, ). Similarly, other researchers (e.g., Ehri, ; Kato, ; Koda, , ) have noted that as readers’ L2 proficiency develops, their orthographic sensitivity also develops and that they increasingly rely for comprehension on orthographic processing rather than phonological processing.…”

Going covert: Inner and private speech in language learning

“…Another aspect to be further investigated is the role of covert articulation and phonological activation in silent L2 reading. This area of research has been addressed theoretically in Ehrich (2006), but little empirical work (Kato 2009;Askildson 2011) has been conducted in L2, FL, or multilingual scenarios since Sokolov's (1972) early psychophysiological studies on the role of IS in reading FL texts.…”

“…Self-reports from five L2 learners of English and Japanese revealed that an L2 inner voice tends to develop with increased proficiency and exposure to naturalistic L2 settings. The other study (Kato 2009) highlights the role of IS in reading L2 texts. Data from 64 L1 Japanese English as a second language (ESL) participants showed that, when the ability to use IS (covert articulation) was suppressed, reading comprehension was affected negatively.…”

“…One of these is the measurement of covert verbal responses through speech interference (frequently including comparisons between silent, subvocal, and overt speech). Techniques such as having the tongue clamped between the teeth, concurrent finger or foot tapping, and concurrent word repetition, which might interfere with normal verbal production while performing a silent task, have contributed to throw light on the role and extent of phonological articulation in covert speech production (Durisko 2006;Aguilar & Aguilar 2008;Kato 2009). Other psycholinguistic methodologies include eye-tracking assessment to obtain information on the pronunciation features of IS during reading (Filik & Barber 2011) and experimenting with speech imagery to collect data on the brain mechanism responsible for an inner voice (Scott 2013).…”