Reading aloud pseudohomophones in Italian: Always an advantage

Abstract

In the present article, the lexical contribution to nonword reading was evaluated using Italian pseudohomophones that contained atypical letters or letter sequences. Pseudohomophones were read faster than orthographically matched nonwords in both mixed (Experiment 1) and pure (Experiment 2) lists; in addition, a base-word frequency effect was obtained in both conditions. The same pseudohomophone advantage was observed when nonwords without atypical letter sequences were mixed in the experimental list (Experiment 3 ), and it disappeared only in lexical decision, in which pseudohomophones were rejected as quickly as control nonwords. The pattern of results was explained by assuming that, due to their orthographic properties, the Italian pseudohomophones did not benefit from an orthographic lexical contribution and were mainly processed through the interaction system between the sublexical mechanisms and the phonological output lexicon. and skilled readers is how lexical and sublexical knowledge is exploited during reading of words that have never been seen before. Most research that has addressed this issue has focused on the relative contributions of orthographic and phonological knowledge used by expert readers to quickly translate a novel visually presented letter string into its phonological/phonetic correspondence (e.g., nonwords such as BLARK). One approach used to examine the lexical contribution to reading aloud is to examine performance for pseudohomophones (PSHs; e.g., BRANE), a special class of nonwords whose pronunciations, but not their spellings, are identical to those of real words (e.g., McCann & Besner, 1987). Recent research has suggested that the time taken to read PSHs aloud is strongly influenced by both orthographic and phonological lexical representations. The goal of the present study was to investigate these issues further by exploiting the alphabetic characteristics of Italian to create PSHs that should minimally activate orthographic lexical representations.The most widely accepted models of visual word recognition and reading aloud postulate that skilled readers have two procedures available for translating print into phonology: a lexical route and a nonlexical route (see Fig. 1). There are currently two computational instantiations of this class of models for English: Coltheart and colleagues' dual-route cascaded model (DRC; Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Zeigler, 2001) and Zorzi and colleagues' connectionist dualprocess model (CDP: Zorzi, Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998; CDP+: Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). These two models are very similar, using a "nested" approach to computational modeling in which subsequent models build upon the success of previous ones. Consequently, both models have had tremendous success in simulating a wide range of empirical findings in the literature.In the DRC and CDP + models, the lexical route consists of an orthographic lexicon, which contains our memories for word spellings, and a phonological lexicon, which contains our memories for wor...

Using Audio-Visual Aids and Computer-Assisted Language Instruction (CALI) to Overcome Learning Difficulties of Sound System in Students of Special Needs

“…Such results revealed that audio-visual aids and CALI had positive educative and treatment effects on the performance levels of students of special needs, notably in matters concerning language components in general and sound system in particular. They also confirmed those of other studies undertaken on the same issue (Gilakjani, 2012;Peressotti & Colombo, 2012;Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012;Pike, 2012;Swimelar, 2013;Wild, 2013;Pérez-Bellido, et al, 2013;and SuHua, et al, 2013).…”

“…Using the Italian pseudo homophones that contained atypical letters or letter sequences in more complex items than those commonly employed within the information-processing approach, but still easier than those used in intelligence tests, Peressotti & Colombo (2012)'s study analyzed how the lexical contribution to non-word reading can be evaluated. The study involved analyzing the outcomes of three experiments and concluded that the Italian pseudo homophones did not benefit from an orthographic lexical contribution.…”

CDP++.Italian: Modelling Sublexical and Supralexical Inconsistency in a Shallow Orthography

“…Peressotti and Colombo [40] examined this in Italian using pseudohomophones that were orthographically often very strange (e.g., cjfra ) and similarly matched nonwords, with the idea being that using nonwords with strange sequences of letters meant that none of the effects they found could be due to orthographic similarities between pseudohomophones and the words that they sounded like. They also compared the results to more orthographically normal non-pseudohomophonic nonwords.…”

“…Despite the strange orthographic patterns used by Peressotti and Colombo [40], we presented their stimuli to CDP++. Not surprisingly, the model had a high error rate, since it simply could not produce a reasonable answer for some of the nonwords, such as when a –j was used as a vowel.…”

“…None of them even produced a trend towards a significant stress consistency effect, and nor was there an orthography-phonology consistency effect with Burani et al's [37] words. Next, we removed lexical activation from the pseudohomophone simulations of Peressotti and Colombo [40], and there was no longer a pseudohomophone effect ( t <1). These results basically suggest two things.…”