Tracking the transition from sublexical to lexical processing: On the creation of orthographic and phonological lexical representations

Abstract

Participants read aloud nonword letter strings, one at a time, which varied in the number of letters. The standard result is observed in two experiments; the time to begin reading aloud increases as letter length increases. This result is standardly understood as reflecting the operation of a serial, left-to-right translation of graphemes into phonemes. The novel result is that the effect of letter length is statistically eliminated by a small number of repetitions. This elimination suggests that these nonwords are no longer always being read aloud via a serial left-to-right sublexical process. Instead, the data are taken as evidence that new orthographic and phonological lexical entries have been created for these nonwords and are now read at least sometimes by recourse to the lexical route. Experiment 2 replicates the interaction between nonword letter length and repetition observed in Experiment 1 and also demonstrates that this interaction is not seen when participants merely classify the string as appearing in upper or lower case. Implications for existing dual-route models of reading aloud and Share's self-teaching hypothesis are discussed.

Keywords:

• Nonword letter length
• Reading aloud
• Lexical entries

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Canada Graduate Scholarship to E.F.R. and Grant A0998 to D.B.

We thank Kathy Rastle as well as an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹ We are aware of the reports by New, Ferrand, Pallier, and Brysbaert (2006) and Balota et al. (2007) that response time (RT) increases as letter length increases. However, in the former case, the task is lexical decision, and the increase in RT as letter length increases does not appear before the word is 7 letters long. Our experiment concentrates on letter strings that vary between 3 to 6 letters. Balota et al. report a letter length effect when reading words aloud, but many of their stimuli are multisyllabic (known to affect reading aloud times) and longer than 6 letters.

² We do not discuss PDP models here given that no currently implemented one produces a letter length effect during reading aloud.

³ Martens and DeJong (2008) reported that repetition reduced the size of the letter length effect for nonwords in dyslexic children. However, they were unable to find a letter length effect in their control group (i.e., an age-matched group) despite numerous demonstrations to that effect (e.g., Weekes, 1997; and here).