Word identification in reading proceeds from spelling to sound to meaning.

Abstract

Van Orden (1987) reported that false positive errors in a categorization task are elevated for homophonic foils (e.g., HARE for A PART OF THE HUMAN BODY). Two new experiments replicate this finding and extend it to nonword homophone foils (e.g., SUTE FOR AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING). False positive errors to nonword homophone foils substantially exceed false positive errors to nonhomophonic nonword spelling controls, showing that the phonological characteristics of the nonword foils are critical. Because nonwords are not represented in the lexicon, this new result implicates computed phonological codes as a source of the categorization errors. Additionally, in each of two experiments, matched word and nonword homophones produced virtually identical error rates. If stimulus nonword homophones are viewed as extremely unfamiliar words, compared with the relatively familiar stimulus word homophones, then our failure to observe an effect of stimulus familiarity strengthens the case that phonological coding plays a role in the identification of all printed words. The fact that the results are obtained in a categorization task that requires reading for meaning (rather than a lexical decision task) makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that phonological mediation plays a role in normal reading of text for meaning.

Cerebral Mechanisms for Suppression of Inappropriate Information during Sentence Comprehension

“…When probed with a target word related to the inappropriate form (e.g., CALM) subjects are slower to reject the target word as being unrelated to the overall meaning of the homophone sentence (e.g., He had lots of patients) as opposed to a nonhomophone control sentence (e.g., He had lots of students). This result is consistent with that of van Orden (1987;van Orden, Johnston, & Hale, 1988) using similar stimuli. Gernsbacher and Faust (1991a) also found that people who were skilled at story comprehension were more efficient at suppressing inappropriate forms of homophones than were less-skilled comprehenders.…”

Age of acquisition, word frequency, and the role of phonology in the lexical decision task

“…The most probable reason is that the presentation of a word results automatically (and unavoidably) in some form ofphonological processing. This is more consistent with models of reading that place derivation of a phonological representation as the primary process in reading (see, e.g., Lukatela & Turvey, 1994a, 1994bVan Orden, 1987Van Orden, Johnston, & Hale, 1988;Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990). These phonological mediation models propose that on an initial encounter with a printed letter string, a prelexical phonological code is created, and that this is compared with representations within a phonological lexicon.…”

fMRI investigation of sentence comprehension by eye and by ear: Modality fingerprints on cognitive processes

“…For example, many models of word processing [e.g., Patterson and Shewell, 1987] propose that reading and listening have separate input systems, but both input systems may then propagate information to a shared language processing system [also Coltheart et al, 1994;Lukatela and Turvey, 1994;Perfetti et al, 1992;Van Orden et al, 1988]. Similarly, according to Geschwind's [1979] description of word comprehension, both reading and listening involve a common pathway through Wernicke's area, but reading also involves a preceding pathway through additional temporo-parietal areas that transform the visual form of the word to its corresponding auditory form.…”