The role of phonology in a letter detection task

Abstract

In two experiments, we investigated whether onsets and rimes have a role in the processing of written English. In both experiments, participants detected letter targets (e.g., t) in nonwords like vult faster than in nonwords like vust. This finding is consistent with Selkirk's (1982) view that sonorants (e.g., the III of vult) cohere with preceding short vowels and are part of the vowel nucleus. In contrast, the ItI of oust is part of the syllable's coda st and so is harder to isolate. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the time required for one to detect single-member codas following vowel digraphs (e.g., the t in veet) was similar to the time to detect the same target letter following a postvocalic sonorant (e.g., the t in vult). No evidence was found for onsets. The results provide support for a phonological organization among letters of printed rimes.A major goal of psycholinguistics is to understand the units involved in the processing of spoken and written English. In speech processing, one level of analysis of analysis is the word. Spoken words also are divisible into syllables and phonemes. Compatibly, English orthography has a lexical level (represented by the spaces between words) and a graphemic level where a letter or a group of letters represents a single sound. Whole words map to complete phonological representations (e.g., aisle-oteul).Graphemes map to individual phonemes (e.g., ck~/k/). Grapheme-phoneme correspondences may exist at an intermediate level, larger than individual graphemes but smaller than words (e.g., break-eiott + leik/). This hypothesis is investigated in the present study.

Evidence for Prosody in Silent Reading

“…We found converging evidence that our skilled, silent readers seemingly "heard" prosodic focus. Our findings supplement the compelling evidence for the role of segmental phonology in skilled reading (Abramson & Goldinger, 1997 ;Acheson & MacDonald, 2009 ;Ashby & Clifton, 2005 ;Ashby et al, 2006 ;Gross et al, 2000 ;Hanson et al, 1991 ;Lukatela et al, 2004 ;McCutchen et al, 1991 ;Treiman, 1994 ;Treiman et al, 1995 ). Our findings complement recent evidence that silent readers extract suprasegmental prosodic features, such as lexical stress and metrical stress, when computing the relations between print and speech (Breen & Clifton, 2011 ), for when these readers encountered an inconsistency between the predicted meter and the required stress of a homograph, they suffered longer fixation times (Breen & Clifton, 2011 ).…”

“…Orthographic rimes, in particular, are phonologically reliable and guide the pronunciation of written words (Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995 ). Orthographic rimes are further divisible into two phonological unitsa vocalic nucleus and syllable-final coda-as demonstrated by their cohesiveness in a Reicher ( 1969 ) and Wheeler ( 1970 ) letter detection task (Gross, Treiman, & Inman, 2000 ). Suggesting that phonological units as large as syllables may be guiding lexical access, neurophysiological evidence reveals that skilled, adult readers prelexically activate syllable-level information during the initial moments of visual word recognition (Ashby, 2010 ).…”

Grapheme coding in L2: How do L2 learners process new graphemes?

“…This is in line with previous reports of phonological effects with this paradigm (Gross, Treiman & Inman, 2000;Lange, 2002). More specifically, it also indicates that phonology can be activated during a L2 visual word recognition task by L2 school learners, and that these participants had a good knowledge of the L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences used in the present stimuli.…”

Letter-by-letter processing in the phonological conversion of multiletter graphemes: Searching for sounds in printed pseudowords

“…Tasks requiring participants to identify letters in words or pseudowords have often been used to explore orthographic processing in lexical access (e.g., Gross, Treiman, & Inman, 2000) and the flow of activation between the orthographic and the phonological systems (Hooper & Paap, 1997;Ziegler & Jacobs, 1995). Similarly, several studies have explored auditory word recognition through the use of phoneme detection tasks (e.g., Frauenfelder & Segui, 1989).…”