The Role of Phonetic Processing in Silent Reading

Abstract

Abstract. In a study designed to test whether the meaning of printed words is perceived directly or by means of phonetic recoding, subjects named pictures on which words or nonwords were superimposed as distractors. In a Stroop task of this kind, the meanings of distractor words which conflict with the names of the pictures on which they appear are known to interfere with picture-naming, even when subjects are not asked to read the words. Instructions in the present study required subjects to either ignore the distractors, read them silently, pronounce them covertly, or say them aloud. The phonetically novel nonwords retarded picture-naming performance more than did real words when phonetic processing was explicitly required, but not during silent reading. In addition, covert pronunciation required more time than silent reading. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that access to the meaning of printed words does not require a phonetic recoding stage. Alternative explanations based on weaker forms of the phonetic recoding hypothesis were discussed. Bradshaw (1975) discussed the role of phonetic recoding in silent reading as one of the central questions in reading research. At issue is whether the skilled reader can extract meaning directly from print or whether a phonological stage must always intervene between an initial visual analysis and the final access of meaning. Certainly when dealing with difficult or unfamiliar material, the skilled reader frequently engages in covert articulation. However, with ideal conditions reading rate can be up to ten times faster than speaking rate (Kolers, 1973); under such circumstances phonological recoding would either function at an extremely abstract level or might be bypassed entirely.Both a phonetic recoding model and a direct access model have some experimental support (Baron, 1973;Green and Shallice, 1976;Kleiman, 1975; a The authors thank Roberta Golinkoff for providing stimulus materials which were modified for use in the present study.