The role of sublexical graphemic processing in reading

Dual-route models of reading postulate the existence of two separate mechanisms: The lexical route allows words to be recognized in their holistic form, and the sublexical route proceeds by converting the written sublexical entities of a word or a nonword into their corresponding phonological equivalents. Sublexical reading is assumed to require three stages of processing: graphemic parsing, graphophonemic conversion, and phoneme blending. This study provides evidence in favor of the existence of a graphemic parsing process which occurs prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. A group of normal subjects read nonwords which contained multiletter graphemes significantly more slowly than graphemically simple nonwords. These results, best interpretable in the context of a recent dual-route model of reading, confirm previous data obtained in pathology which suggest the functional independence of this cognitive procedure.