The role of phonology in lexical access in teenagers with a history of dyslexia

Abstract

We examined phonological recoding during silent sentence reading in teenagers with a history of dyslexia and their typically developing peers. Two experiments are reported in which participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church), pseudohomophones (e.g., cherch), and spelling controls (e.g., charch). In Experiment 1 we examined foveal processing of the target word/nonword stimuli, and in Experiment 2 we examined parafoveal pre-processing. There were four participant groups-older teenagers with a history of dyslexia, older typically developing teenagers who were matched for age, younger typically developing teenagers who were matched for reading level, and younger teenagers with a history of dyslexia. All four participant groups showed a pseudohomophone advantage, both from foveal processing and parafoveal preprocessing, indicating that teenagers with a history of dyslexia engage in phonological recoding for lexical identification during silent sentence reading in a comparable manner to their typically developing peers.

The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development

“…Whilst it is widely recognised that children rely on phonological decoding in the early stages of learning to read, current theories do not fully account for skilled readers’ pre-lexical processing of phonology, that is, phonological recoding [5,6,7,8,9,10], with only one recent model of word recognition seeming to account for this developmental transition (the multiple-route model; [59]). Eye movement research has shown pre-lexical processing of phonology in typically developing readers from the age of 7 years through to skilled adult readers, as well as in atypical developmental groups, despite the tasks used not requiring any overt phonological processing [14,35,39,43,53,54]. Thus, eye movement research provides compelling evidence for phonology having a continued and pervasive role in facilitating lexical identification during reading (consistent with the multiple-route model; [59]).…”

“…Atypical development. Most recently, studies have begun to show evidence for pre-lexical phonological processing in populations with atypical reading development, specifically in individuals with permanent childhood hearing loss (PCHL; [53]) and individuals with developmental dyslexia [54]. Both of these participant populations are known to commonly experience substantial difficulties in learning to read, and one component of these difficulties is thought to be poor phonological processing skills, e.g., [55,56,57].…”

“…In the case of developmental dyslexia, both overall reading difficulties and specific difficulties in phonological awareness and processing have been well-documented; indeed, poor phonological processing skills are largely accepted as the predominant cause of developmental dyslexia, e.g., [56,57]. Again, though, recent research has shown that teenagers with dyslexia still exhibit a pseudohomophone advantage during reading during both direct fixation and parafoveal preview [54]. Similar to the data from teenagers with PCHL, this pseudohomophone advantage during silent sentence reading was observed, in contrast to significantly poorer performance on overt tasks of phonological processing compared to their typically developing peers.…”

“…In sum, eye movement research in recent years has provided strong evidence for pre-lexical phonological recoding by adults, typically developing children, and even individuals with PCHL or dyslexia during silent sentence reading, e.g., [14,37,39,40,41,42,43,53,54]. These data challenge theoretical accounts of reading development which posit that phonological processing during lexical identification reduces with time and reading skill, e.g., [5,6,7,8,9,10].…”

Frequency Effects on Spelling Error Recognition: An ERP Study

“…In contrast to these studies, we used a method of silent reading, in which participants are not required to pronounce words or explicitly decide upon their lexical status. Such a paradigm allows the exploration of cognitive processes underlying reading without extraneous task demands, and according to some authors, it is better suited for research on visual word recognition (Bermúdez-Margaretto et al, 2020a; Blythe et al, 2020). We manipulated the word form frequency (high vs. low) and the correct spelling (correct words vs. words with error) of the written words in the silent word reading ERP task to test the following hypotheses: (1) word frequency influences error recognition; and (2) the time course of real error recognition is similar to pseudohomophone recognition, but due to the orthographic similarity with correctly written words, it can have its own characteristics.…”