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There are two ways in which written words can activate phonology. First, a word in its entirety can be recognized as a familiar visual stimulus associated with a particular pronunciation. Patterson (1982) called this form of translation “addressed phonology” because the phonology is “looked up” after the visual word has been recognized. The second way is to translate parts of words (e.g., letters) into sounds. Termed “assembled phonology,” this makes it possible to pronounce pseudowords (sequences of letters that look like words, but that do not exist in the language, e.g., teel). Assembled phonology is also needed to pronounce new words (e.g., the name of a new colleague: “Mr. Brissbart”).

Languages differ in the extent to which assembled phonology is possible. Assembled phonology can only happen in languages with written symbols that represent sounds, such as alphabetic or syllabic languages. Assembled phonology is not possible in scripts in which written symbols primarily refer to word meanings. This is the case for logographic languages, such as Chinese, where words are coded by a combination of roughly 4,500 characters (Perfetti et al., 2013). Although Chinese characters often include systematic components (called radicals) that refer to sounds (Liu et al., 2020), it is virtually impossible to pronounce an unfamiliar Chinese character (see McBride et al., this volume).

Languages with assembled phonology differ in the extent to which associations between orthography and phonology are transparent, a variable called orthographic depth (Frost et al., 1987; Schmalz et al., 2015; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). English orthography is low in transparency. The pronunciation of letters (and letter combinations) often differs between words (compare tough – though – through, gave – have, hint – pint). As a result, children learning to read in English require considerably more time to become fluent than children learning to read more transparent languages, such as Spanish, Italian, or Finnish (Caravolas et al., 2013; Galletly & Knight, 2004; Hanley et al., 2004; Lindgren et al., 1985; Reis et al., 2020) (see Caravolas, this volume). Nobody names the word awry correctly on the basis of assembled phonology. In contrast, children reading a transparent language can pronounce nearly all written words on the basis of a simple set of translation rules, allowing them to easily learn new written words through self‐teaching (Share, 1999; Ziegler et al., 2014; Castles & Nation, this volume). The difficulties that children learning to read English face can be simulated by asking adult participants to name pseudowords. Pritchard et al. (2012) reported that some English pseudowords are easy to read aloud (e.g., ent, foz, gert), but that others take a long time to read and elicit more than 20 different pronunciations (e.g., jeich, sheche, tuise). In transparent languages, all words are of the former type; in opaque languages, there are many words of the latter type.

An interesting question at this point is the extent to which phonological effects in silent reading are based on addressed or assembled phonology. All findings in Table 4.1 can be explained with addressed phonology: They involve known words and, in principle, these can be recognized without reference to sublexical phonology. This explanation also neatly accounts for the observation that Chinese readers experience a tongue‐twister effect (Zhang & Perfetti, 1993). Equally though, addressed phonology cannot explain all effects. For example, in Blythe et al.’s (2018) experiment, participants had less difficulty reading a homophonic pseudoword like cheeze than a control pseudoword cheene. This difference cannot be due to addressed phonology alone, as pseudowords are not represented in the mental dictionary. Instead, it must reflect some form of assembled phonology.

Figure 4.1 Masked priming paradigm. A prime is presented briefly between a forward mask consisting of XXXXXX or ####### and a target word. Although participants report not seeing the prime, it facilitates recognition of the target word if there is overlap between the prime and target. The overlap can be orthographic, phonological, morphological, or semantic.

Stronger evidence for the involvement of assembled phonology in visual word recognition in English comes from experiments using masked priming. In masked priming (Figure 4.1), a target word is preceded by a prime, presented so briefly (~50 milliseconds) that participants report not seeing it. Still, participants are influenced by the prime: A target word is processed more efficiently when the prime is related to it than when it is not. Perfetti and Bell (1991) observed more priming of target words (e.g., rate) with homophonic pseudowords as primes (e.g., rait) than with orthographic control primes (e.g., ralt) that share the same letter overlap with the target but not the same overlap in sound. Because the primes were pseudowords, the effect could only be explained on the basis of assembled phonology.

Phonology‐mediated masked priming has been observed in many studies, at least when prime duration is slightly longer than 50 ms and when there is a considerable difference in phonology between the homophonic prime and the orthographic control prime (for review, see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006). The activation of assembled phonology seems to be automatic: Phonological priming is still evident when strategic effects are minimized by reducing the proportion of phonological priming trials to only 9% (Xu & Perfetti, 1999). Another important demonstration came from Lukatela and Turvey (1994) who reported priming of the target word FROG by the pseudoword tode. This shows that written words can activate their meaning through assembled phonology (tode – toad – FROG).

In summary, there is good evidence that phonological information is activated during word reading, and that the activation can be in the form of assembled phonology as well as addressed phonology.