The visual tongue-twister effect: Phonological activation in silent reading

Abstract

We discuss the activation of phonological information during silent reading and report two experiments demonstratng a visual tongue-twister effect. Judgments of semantic acceptability took longer for sentences which repeated initial consonants or consonant pairs differing only in voicing such as /p/ and /b/ (tongue-twisters), compared with matched phonetically “neutral” sentences (those containing a natural mix of phenemes). In addition, concurrent vocalization with a tongue-twister phrase slowed performance, but did not produce reliable specific interference when the vocalization phrase repeated the same word-initial consonant (for example, bilabial /p/) as the sentences being read. We argue that the longer reading times for tongue-twisters is caused by interference due to the similarity of the phonetic representations automatically activated during reading. The lack of specific interference between concurrent vocalization and the reading task suggests that these automatically activated phonetic repreesntations are not subvocal motor programs and that the concurrent vocalization paradigm is not an appropriate method to examine the phonological information used during reading.