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While reading is among the most important and well-researched topics of developmental psychology, sublexical regularities and how these regularities relate to reading skills have attracted less interest so far. This study tested general orthographic knowledge (GOK) using an indirect reaction time (RT)-based task, in which participants had to detect letters appearing within frequent and infrequent letter clusters. The aim of the method was to minimise the roles of phonological activation and metalinguistic decision. Three different age-groups of German-speaking individuals were tested: first graders (N = 60), third graders (N = 68), and adults (N = 44). Orthographic regularity affected RTs in all three groups, with significantly lower RTs for frequent than for infrequent clusters. The indirect measure of GOK did not show an association with reading measures in first graders and adults, but in the case of third graders it explained variance over and above age and phonological skills. This study provides evidence for phonology-independent GOK, at least in third graders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past 30 years of reading research has confirmed the importance of bottom-up processing. Rather than a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967), reading is dependent on rapid, accurate recognition of written forms. In fluent first language (L1) readers, this is seen in the automatic activation of a word's phonological form, impacting lexical processing (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Rayner, Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995). Although the influence of phonological form is well established, less clear is the extent to which readers are sensitive to the possible pronunciations of a word (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1998), derived from the varying consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (e.g., although 'great' has only one pronunciation, [ɡɹeɪt], the grapheme within it has multiple possible pronunciations: [i] in [plit] 'pleat', [ɛ] in [bɹɛθ] 'breath'; Parkin, 1982). Further, little is known about non-native readers' sensitivity to such characteristics. Non-native readers process text differently from L1 readers (Koda & Zehler, 2008; McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong & Li, 2004), with implications for understanding L2 reading comprehension (Rayner, Chace, Slattery & Ashby, 2006). The goal of this study was thus to determine whether native and non-native readers are sensitive to the consistency of a word's component GPCs during lexical processing and to compare this sensitivity among readers from different L1s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recently, Meyer, Belke, Telling and Humphreys (2007) reported that competitor objects with homophonous names (e.g., boy) interfere with identifying a target object (e.g., buoy) in a visual search task, suggesting that an object name's phonology becomes automatically activated even in situations in which participants do not have the intention to speak. The present study explored the generality of this finding by testing a different phonological relation (rhyming object names, e.g., cat–hat) and by varying details of the experimental procedure. Experiment 1 followed the procedure by Meyer et al. Participants were familiarized with target and competitor objects and their names at the beginning of the experiment and the picture of the target object was presented prior to the search display on each trial. In Experiment 2, the picture of the target object presented prior to the search display was replaced by its name. In Experiment 3, participants were not familiarized with target and competitor objects and their names at the beginning of the experiment. A small interference effect from phonologically related competitors was obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 but not in Experiment 3, suggesting that the way the relevant objects are introduced to participants affects the chances of observing an effect from phonologically related competitors. Implications for the information flow in the conceptual–lexical system are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the event-related potential (ERP) technique, we examined the time course of phonological and semantic activation in Chinese word recognition. Participants did a semantic judgment task and a homophone judgment task over the same set of word pairs. Each pair was of either high or low word frequency and the two words were either unrelated or related semantically or phonologically, i.e., being homophones. For high-frequency words, both the semantically related pairs in the homophone task and the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited ERP responses different from the unrelated control pairs in the N400 component but not any component earlier, suggesting a similar time course for semantic and phonological activation. For low-frequency words, the semantically related pairs in the homophone task were associated with a similar modulation of N400. However, compared to the unrelated controls, the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited a larger P200, a component implicated in phonological processing in the literature, and thus demonstrated a phonological activation earlier than semantic activation. The results showed that word frequency affects the time course of semantic and phonological activation suggesting that phonology is not invariably activated before semantics in Chinese word recognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent research has shown that phonological neighborhood density facilitates naming latencies. In an attempt to extend this work, the authors evaluated the effect of phonological neighborhood distribution by comparing responding to words that consisted of 3 phonemes but differed in the number of phoneme positions that could be changed to form a neighbor (i.e., 2 vs. 3 positions). The results revealed that words in which all 3 positions could be changed to form a neighbor were named more rapidly than were words in which only 2 positions could be changed. The results show that this effect occurs due to a difference between the 2 groups of words in terms of their least supported phoneme (i.e., the phoneme position within a word with which the fewest neighbors overlap). The authors show that differences in terms of the number of neighbors for the least supported phoneme can also explain past research that indicates an effect of phonological neighborhood density on naming. The authors explain the results of this research using the dual-route cascaded model of reading aloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In these experiments, cross-script masked repetition priming and word frequency effects were examined for Japanese words and nonwords as a function of script familiarity and the nature of the task (lexical decision or naming). In the lexical decision task, masked repetition priming effects were observed only for word targets and those effects were larger for targets presented in an orthographically unfamiliar script than for targets presented in an orthographically familiar script. In contrast, in the naming task, masked repetition priming effects were observed for both word and nonword targets and, for word targets, the repetition priming effects were similar regardless of the orthographic familiarity of the targets. In addition, large word frequency effects were observed when the targets were presented in a familiar script, but the effects were diminished or eliminated when the targets were presented in an unfamiliar script in both tasks. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of the possible loci of the priming effects in the two tasks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]