Activation Of Phonological Codes Research Articles

Individual differences in the efficiency of word recognition.

The purpose of this study was to examine the hypothesis that the attentional demands of word recognition covary with other measures of reading efficiency. Individual differences in efficiency were indexed by (a) speed and accuracy of lexical access, (b) obligatory activation of phonological codes, and (c) working memory capacity. The attentional demands of word recognition were measured with a dual-task technique. Subjects performed naming and probe-detection tasks separately (single task) and in combination (dual task). The results showed that single-task to dual-task decrements in performance on the naming and probe tasks were predicted by measures of the speed and accuracy of lexical access, obligatory activation of phonological codes, and efficiency of working memory. These findings provide support for the widespread assumption that the attentional demands of basic reading processes are a source of individual differences in reading skill.

Phonological code activation during listening.

Rhyme priming to visually dissimilar rhymes (e.g., eight-late) was used in a lexical decision task to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. One member of the rhyme pair was embedded in a sentence and the other was presented visually for lexical decision. Rhyme priming obtained when the prime and target were separated by four but not by seven intervening words, suggesting that the phonological code for the word was initially accessed and then rapidly decayed.

The time course of phonological code activation in two writing systems

Models of visual word recognition differ in assumptions about the extent to which phonological information is used, and the processes by which it becomes available. These issues were examined in two studies of word recognition in two writing systems, English and Chinese, which are structured along different principles (alphabetic and logographic, respectively). The results indicate that in each writing system, a large pool of higher frequency words is recognized on a visual basis, without phonological mediation. Phonology only enters into the processing of lower frequency words. Thus, although there may be other differences among writing systems which influence processing, differences in the manner in which they represent phonology are not relevant to the recognition of common words. The results are consistent with a parallel interactive model of word recognition in which orthographic and phonological information are activated at different latencies.