The central goal of this project is to discover whether there is a communality between the phonology of speech and the phonology employed in printed word recognition. Understanding the relation between these phonological representations is important to our understanding of the process of printed word recognition in reading and to our understanding of reasons for failures to learn to read as explored in Feldmen's project. Six sections of the project investigate different aspects of this issue. The first two sections focus on the mental lexicon's orthographic representations and their relation to phonological lexical counterparts. The first section studies whether (and under what conditions) recognition of a spoken word activates its spelling. The second asks how memory for a spelling (the lexical orthographic representation) is influenced by knowledge of the spoken word (the lexical phonological representation). Recent evidence suggests that the instability often found in memory for the spelling of a word is limited by the word's phonological representation. The third and fourth sections assess the proposal that the phonology assembled by Carol Fowler and Best during printed word recognition can be characterized as a gestural representation such as that explored in Projects and whether the gestural distinction between consonants and vowels is reflected in reading words. In the third section, subjects attempt to make discriminations based on the gestural densities of printed words. In the fourth, briefly-presented and masked letters are used to prime consonants or vowels of spoken words; a positive cross modal priming effect will provide evidence of an early and automatic activation of spoken phonology by print. The final two sections take a neurophysiological approach to search for a common basis for the phonology generated in reading and the phonology of speech. Studies in the fifth section use functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for changes in metabolism in particular cortical areas during tasks that specifically separate orthographic and phonological processing. In a complementary manner, the sixth section uses evoked response potential techniques to study athe temporal changes in electrophysiological profiles caused by these tasks. The two sets of studies together will provide information on the location and timing of orthographic and phonological processing and address, directly, athe issue of their anatomical and functional community.
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