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Concerning readers’ self‐reports, Huey wrote, “Of nearly thirty adults who were thus tested, the large majority found inner speech in some form to be a part of their ordinary reading. Purely visual reading was not established by any of the readers,.…” (1908, p. 119). This conclusion about phonology during silent reading continues to seem correct (see Brysbaert, this volume).

The issue in word identification is more specific: whether the phonology of a word is “prelexical” – the phonemes activated by letters and letter strings lead to word identification – or “postlexical” – word phonology follows after access to the orthographic form of the word. Opinion generally favored a direct‐to‐meaning identification procedure with no prelexical phonology in skilled reading, rationalized partly by questionable assumptions about the consequences of English spellings: Because English spelling‐to‐pronunciation mappings have inconsistencies, readers learn to read English without using these unreliable mappings.

However, various experimental approaches provided evidence to the contrary. One was to expose a word briefly (35–45 ms) followed by a backward mask consisting of letter strings. When the letter mask reinstated the word’s phonemes, identification of the word improved, even when the letters were changed (choir – #### – kwire) (Perfetti et al., 1988). This effect implies that, prior to the word’s identification, some of its phonology had been activated. Lukatela and Turvey (1994a, b), using a similar logic with primed lexical decision, found that homophone primes (e.g., towed – toad) produced strong facilitation relative to spelling controls. These conclusions were supported by a meta‐analysis by Rastle and Brysbaert (2006).

The most well‐known evidence came from the semantic category judgment experiments of van Orden (1987). Presented with the category “flowers,” readers sometimes made category mistakes on the word rows, suggesting that the word’s phonology was activated automatically, creating confusion with rose. Jared and Seidenberg (1991) found this effect was limited to low frequency words when only shallow meaning (animate/inanimate) decisions were required. For a familiar word, some general meaning features may be accessible prior to full phonology. More generally, both phonological and semantic activations are triggered by a familiar word form in an interdependent way. The rapid activation of a word’s phonology can stabilize the word’s identity including its meaning features (van Orden et al., 1990).

Table 1.1 summarizes the properties and functions of the phonology that, on our account, are part of word identification. In alphabetic reading, this involves automatic, recurring interactions between letter strings and phoneme strings, including the whole word level. These orthographic‐phonological interactions occur in the most rapid swirls of the fast current of skilled reading, resulting in a stable word identity that remains accessible during the reading of the sentence that contains it.

Beyond the mere activation of lexical phonology is its content. The speed of silent reading could suggest that, rather than a fully specified pronunciation, a phonological skeleton of (more reliable) consonants is quickly activated, followed by (less reliable) vowels (Berent & Perfetti, 1995). Other research implicates a fuller, multilevel phonology including stress patterns (Ashby & Clifton, 2005). Some uncertainty remains concerning the phonological content and the time course of segmental (consonants and vowels) and supra‐segmental (lexical stress) phonology. However, a rapidly activated phonological component of word identification has been confirmed in research on sentences as well as isolated words across multiple methods, including eye‐tracking, ERP, and MEG studies (Halderman et al., 2012).

Table 1.1 Properties and functions of phonology during word identification

Properties	Functions
Automatic or Routine	Not easily suppressed	Helps stabilize word identity	Stable identity supports memory and comprehension
Universal or Highly General	Observed in all writing systems
Sublexical as well as Lexical	Sublexical processes depend on writing system
Rich Content	From low level (articulatory features) to supra‐segmental (syllabic stress)