Do phonological constraints on the spoken word affect visual lexical decision?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Reading involves grapheme-phoneme conversion and phonological assimilation.
• Assimilation may alter phonemes generated during reading.
• The impact of assimilation on visual word recognition is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether phonological assimilation affects visual word identification.
• To determine if processing demands differ for words requiring assimilation during reading.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted with 40 fluent Korean readers each.
• Visual lexical decision tasks were used.
• Stimuli included Korean orthographic forms requiring (C) or not requiring (NC) phoneme assimilation.

Main Results:

• NC words were identified faster than C words.
• C nonwords were rejected faster than NC nonwords.
• These findings indicate assimilation influences reading speed.

Conclusions:

• Phoneme-to-phoneme transformations during speech production may also play a role in visual word recognition.
• Assimilation processes are implicated in the cognitive mechanisms of reading.
• The study provides evidence for the interplay between spoken and written language processing.