Speech recoding in reading

Abstract

Three experiments explored whether recoding to speech during reading occurs before lexical access, after lexical access, or not at all. Experiments I and III determined the effects of a concurrent shadowing task, which disrupts recoding, on decisions requiring lexical information retrieval but not sentence comprehension (synonymy and category decisions) and on sentence acceptability judgments. These effects were compared to the effect of shadowing on phonemic decisions, which require recoding, and graphemic decisions, which, as shown by Experiment II, do not involve recoding. The results suggest that subjects did not recode to speech while making the synonymy and category decisions, but did recode during the acceptability decisions. This pattern of results provides support for a model of reading sentences in which speech recoding occurs after lexical access and facilitates the temporary storage of words necessary for sentence comprehension.