Are people consistent when reading nonwords aloud on different occasions?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Reading Science

Background:

• Nonword reading tasks are crucial for understanding reading mechanisms and assessing reading ability.
• Current models often assume stable spelling-sound correspondences guide nonword pronunciation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the variability in adult nonword reading performance across repeated sessions.
• To examine factors influencing pronunciation variability, specifically grapheme-to-phoneme ambiguity.

Main Methods:

• Adult participants repeatedly read a set of 50 nonwords over five separate sessions.
• Analysis focused on intraparticipant consistency and the impact of grapheme ambiguity on pronunciation variation.

Main Results:

• Significant session-to-session variability was observed in nonword pronunciation by the same individuals.
• Nonwords with ambiguous graphemes (multiple pronunciations) elicited greater intraparticipant variation.
• Pronunciation frequencies shifted over time, with some responses becoming more common and others less so.

Conclusions:

• Nonword reading is not a static reflection of long-term spelling-sound knowledge but exhibits dynamic variability.
• Understanding the mechanisms of this variability is essential for accurately interpreting individual differences in reading skills.
• Snapshot assessments of nonword reading may not fully capture an individual's reading capabilities due to this inherent variability.