Testing the role of phonology in reading: focus on sentence processing

Most reading research investigating the role of phonology in word recognition has focused on studies employing an individual word as the sole stimulus. The bulk of such research has offered support for the phonological recoding hypothesis, the conjecture that access to a printed word's meaning requires activation of the word's phonology (i.e., meaning is not typically activated via orthography alone). A criticism of such studies is that by presenting participants with only a single word on each experimental trial (a nonecological manipulation), participants may alter their typical strategy of reading in such a way as to artificially favor the phonological recoding hypothesis. The present study avoided a focus on single words by requiring participants to read sentences and paragraphs for comprehension. Experiment 1 showed that, in reading a paragraph of connected sentences, eliminating a letter in a word that altered the phonology was more deleterious than eliminating a letter that did. Experiment 2 focused on the reading of each sentence itself rather than on the paragraph and provided additional control conditions. The results were similar to those of Experiment 1, consistent with the phonological recoding hypothesis.