Abstract
Vowel length is known to affect reaction times in single word reading. Eye movement studies involving silent sentence reading showed that phonological information of a word can be acquired even before it is fixated. However, it remained an open question whether vowel length directly influences oculomotor control in sentence reading. In the present eye tracking study, subjects read sentences that included target words of varying vowel length and frequency. In Experiment 1, subjects read silently for comprehension, whereas Experiment 2 involved oral reading. Experiments 3 and 4 additionally included an articulatory suppression task and a foot tapping task. Results indicated that in conditions that did not require additional articulation (Experiments 1 and 4) gaze durations were increased for words with long vowels compared to words with short vowels. Conditions that required simultaneous articulation (Experiments 2 and 3) did not yield a vowel length effect. The results point to an influence of phonetic properties on oculomotor control during silent reading around the time of the completion of lexical access.
Highlights
During silent reading, we often subjectively experience the presence of inner speech
It seems reasonable to conclude that phonetic information plays a significant role during lexical access in silent sentence reading
And in contrast to the observed word frequency effect, the vowel length effect was not significantly present in first fixation durations, suggesting that vowel length information is likely processed at later stages of word processing
Summary
We often subjectively experience the presence of inner speech. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, Huey (1908/1968) stressed the importance of this phenomenon for understanding information processing during reading (see Brown, 1958; Egger, 1904). He stated that phonological representations are auditory in nature, like a voice in the head rather than an abstract code of phonological parameters (e.g., Fodor, 1998; Fredriksen & Kroll, 1976; McCusker, Hillinger, & Bias, 1981; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Rudy, 1974; Spoehr & Smith, 1971). While some studies reported evidence that phonological representations are to a large extent similar to speech (Klapp, 1971; McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982), the main view in linguistic theory assumes that lexical representations of a word do not include phonetic information, but rather abstract phonological codes (linear generative phonology, see Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Kenstowicz & Kisserberth, 1979)
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