Psychology of Reading
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Role of Speech in Reading
In earlier days, people would not have questioned that talking in inherently linked to reading – silent reading was rare:
St. Augustine in his “Confessions”
remarks about monk Ambrose to reading without obvious speech
“But while reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.
Role of Speech in Reading
Practical importance of this issue –
How do we teach reading
phonics method emphasizes grapheme/phoneme conversions
whole-word method- emphasizes direct connection between the written word as a patttern and its meaning
How do we teach the deaf reader
How do we deal with dialect mismatch
Why Propose Speech Process in Reading
Do you hear your voice or others during reading?
Recording electrical impulses on skin that lies directly over speech muscles (electromyography or EMG)
while reading, these muscles are activated!
Hardyck and Petrinovich 70 study
Used biofeedback to reduce EMG activity in larynx (Adams apple)
suppressed EMG activity led to poorer comprehension of difficult material, but not easy material. Why?
Levels of Speech Representation
Phonetic Level
Represented by “Phones” – universal
set of speech sounds. Eg., sounds of the letter t in Table, little, cat. Subtle differences that we can not readily recognize in the sounds for t – thus separate phones needed.
Phonological level represented by phonemes.- speech sounds that we can actual recognize. So the t sound is represented among all sounds for the t sound. Overhead162
Levels of Speech Representation
Syllable – smallest segments of speech that can be articulated independently. Usually contains a vowel and a consonant.
Evidence for Speech Coding
Conrads effect: harder to memorize similar sounding letters, than different sounding letters.
B,v,t,z,v,z harder to remember than s, t, n, w, q
Using the speech code is automatic, even in languages without a phonologically based script.
Tzeng, Hung, and Wang (1977) – Chinese ideographs become confused in memory if they sound similar!
Evidence for Speech Coding
Lexical decision task:
speed with which we identify if presentation is a word
Illegal and nonpronouncable nonwords faster to identify (likj, sagm)
Slower when nonwords were legal and pronounceable (strig, barp).
Even slower when nonword homophones presented (e.g., trate, tew).
Suggests that printed word is translated into some form of speech and then lexicon is consulted.
So not a direct route from word to meaning without speech overhead167
Evidence for Speech Coding
Forced choice – Hawkins, Reicher, Rogers, & Peterson, 1976
Subject presented very briefly a word such as coin”. Then subject presented word pairs such as join-coin.
Person indicates which word was presented first – coin or join.
Person must decide among alternatives (i.e., forced choice)
What if subject is presented cent real fast, and then is presented cent-sent. Should that be harder than cent-lent. Why?
Evidence for Speech Coding
Regularity effect: faster to name regular words than irregular words
Regular words- can be read via the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules, such are mode, stop.
Irregular words- can not apply GPC rules. E.g., deaf
For irregular words there is a conflict between the GPC pronunciation and the correct pronunciation (e.g., deaf being read like leaf)
Speech for Short-Term Memory
Phonetic – the specific sounds that we can not necessarily perceive, such as the p sound in poke and spoke.
Phonological – more abstract representation of sounds that we can perceive. The p phoneme is why we perceive similar p sound in poke and spoke.
After lexical access, keeping speech based representations in working memory is very useful:
One reason is that sentences often have large distances between related words
Throw the horse over the fence some hay
Speech for Short-Term Memory
Kleiman (1975). Asked subjects to shadow digits while also identifying presented word pairs
Digits presented via earphones, and subject repeated the digits orally.
Word pairs presented and subject made times yes/no decisions concerning
Phonemic level: tickle/pickle sound similar, while lemon/demon do not sound similar.
Graphemic: heard/beard look similar while grace/price do not
Semantic: mourne/grieve meaning similar but depart/couple do not
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