"To Name or Not to Name: That is the Question": The Role of Response Inhibition in Reading.

Abstract

Reading is a complex process that includes the integration of information about letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). In many circumstances, such as noisy environments, response inhibition is an additional factor that plays a marked role in successful oral reading. Response inhibition can take the form of task relevant inhibition (i.e., foils in a go/no-go task) and task irrelevant inhibition (i.e., distractor information). Here we investigated task relevant inhibition by having participants (N = 30) take part in two tasks: go/no-go naming with nonwords foils (GNG-NW) and go/no-go naming with pseudohomophones foils (GNG-PH). Also, we investigated the addition of task irrelevant inhibition by having participants (N = 28) take part in two tasks: GNG-NW + information masking and GNG-PH + information masking. We provide evidence that during a task relevant inhibition task, sub-word sound level information can be successfully inhibited, as evidenced by comparable response times for regular words and exception words, provided the foils do not contain familiar sound-based information (GNG-NW). In contrast, regular words were read aloud faster than exception words in a GNG-PH task, indicating that sub-word level interference occurs when the foils contain familiar sound-based information. The addition of task irrelevant inhibition (i.e., information masking at the phoneme level), served to increase response time overall, but did not impact the pattern of response times between regular words and exception words. Together these findings provide useful information regarding the role of response inhibition in word recognition and may be useful in computational models of word recognition and future work may benefit from accounting for the effects outlined in this paper.