Reading without phonology: ERP evidence from skilled deaf readers of Spanish

Brendan Costello,Sendy Caffarra,Noemi Fariña,Manuel Carreiras,Jon Andoni Duñabeitia

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-84490-5

Abstract

Reading typically involves phonological mediation, especially for transparent orthographies with a regular letter to sound correspondence. In this study we ask whether phonological coding is a necessary part of the reading process by examining prelingually deaf individuals who are skilled readers of Spanish. We conducted two EEG experiments exploiting the pseudohomophone effect, in which nonwords that sound like words elicit phonological encoding during reading. The first, a semantic categorization task with masked priming, resulted in modulation of the N250 by pseudohomophone primes in hearing but not in deaf readers. The second, a lexical decision task, confirmed the pattern: hearing readers had increased errors and an attenuated N400 response for pseudohomophones compared to control pseudowords, whereas deaf readers did not treat pseudohomophones any differently from pseudowords, either behaviourally or in the ERP response. These results offer converging evidence that skilled deaf readers do not rely on phonological coding during visual word recognition. Furthermore, the finding demonstrates that reading can take place in the absence of phonological activation, and we speculate about the alternative mechanisms that allow these deaf individuals to read competently.

Highlights

Learning to read is a transformative experience for socio-economic mobility and for our cognitive d evelopment1,2
Since our aim is to determine whether phonology is automatically activated in word reading, we wish to avoid task-driven effects that might activate phonological representations: we focus on implicit reading tasks that do not involve making decisions about the phonological form of the word
Since orthographic depth can modulate the role of phonological coding during r eading4,10–12, the absence of phonological coding in deaf readers of languages like English31 or Hebrew16 may be due to the opaque orthography

Summary

Introduction

Learning to read is a transformative experience for socio-economic mobility and for our cognitive d evelopment. In a language with a transparent orthography, like Spanish, phonological codes are automatically accessed during r eading. Since orthographic depth can modulate the role of phonological coding during r eading, the absence of phonological coding in deaf readers of languages like English or Hebrew may be due to the opaque orthography. The properties of the orthographic representation lead us to expect the engagement of phonological encoding: a study of deaf readers of Spanish found evidence of phonological coding. In this study we focus on the minority of deaf readers who have good reading skills For those deaf individuals who read a transparent orthography well, what role does phonology play?

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