Does word identification proceed from spelling to sound to meaning?

Abstract

Six experiments addressed the role of phonological information in visual word recognition using a semantic-decision task. Experiment 1 replicated Van Orden's (1987) finding that Ss make more false-positive errors on homophone foils than on spelling controls, indicating phonological activation of meaning. Experiment 2 showed that only lower frequency words yield this effect when broader categories are used. In Experiments 3 and 4, the homophony effect for lower frequency words remained, even though the stimuli included a large proportion of homophones, suggesting that activation of phonological information cannot be strategically inhibited. Experi-ments 5 and 6 examined effects of homophony on targets that were correct category exemplars and yielded similar results. These studies indicate that in skilled readers, phonological information contributes to the activation of word meaning only for low-frequency words. The word's orthographies represent different solutions to the problem of representing spoken language in written form. Orthographies differ in the extent to which the written sym-bols encode phonological information. Historically, orthogra-phies have evolved toward more direct representations of

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