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English has inconsistencies in the mappings from orthography to phonology. The grapheme ea can refer to the phoneme /i/ (as in bead) or /ε/ (as in head). Which of these is activated by assembled phonology?

One assumption might be that that there is a set of grapheme‐phoneme correspondence rules and only one phoneme is activated (see Rastle & Coltheart, 1999, for a set of rules). In the example of ea, the grapheme‐phoneme conversion rule would be ea ‐> /i/, on the basis that this is the most frequent conversion in English monosyllabic words containing the grapheme ea. On the basis of assembled phonology, the word head would be pronounced /hid/. Words with a conflict between assembled and addressed phonology are called irregular words (because they do not follow the rules).

The word‐naming task has been used to investigate conflicts between assembled and addressed phonology. Participants are presented with printed words and asked to name them aloud as rapidly as possible. As predicted, Rastle and Coltheart (1999) observed longer naming times for irregular words (hearts) than for regular words (hounds). In addition, the effect was stronger when the irregularity was at the beginning of the word (aisle) than toward the end (swap). Rastle and Coltheart interpreted this as evidence for the hypothesis that assembled phonology is a serial process going from word beginning to word end.

The assumption that there is a set of grapheme‐phoneme correspondence rules has been contested, however. Glushko (1979) observed that participants took longer to name the word wave than wade, even though both contained the same vowel grapheme and both followed the ae ‐> /ā/ rule. Glushko argued that the difference arose because all words ending on –ade are pronounced in the same way, whereas this is not true for the words ending on –ave (think of have). According to Glushko, what is important is not whether a grapheme‐phoneme conversion follows a rule, but the extent to which the conversion is consistent across words.

Further research found that in words with inconsistent mappings, not one but all possible phonemes become activated to some extent. This would mean that the written word bead activates both the phonology /bid/ and /bεd/; similarly, the assembled phonology of head includes both /hid/ and /hεd/. Evidence comes from Lesch and Pollatsek (1993) who observed that participants often erroneously indicate that the written words PILLOW and BEAD are semantically related. This is only possible if the visual word bead also activates the phonological code /bεd/.

More evidence for the automatic activation of several possible phonological codes from orthography comes from research with bilinguals. If assembled phonology is computed automatically (Xu & Perfetti, 1999), the question then arises as to which phonology is computed in bilinguals who have mastered several alphabetic languages. Take a Dutch‐English bilingual for whom the Dutch word meel (flower) sounds like male and the English word male has the same Dutch rhyme pronunciation as the word finale. Which phonological forms are activated when the bilingual person reads a text? The phonology of the first language (Dutch)? Or the phonology of the language being read, in which case the activation of assembled phonology cannot be automatic but is under strategic control?

A series of studies show that bilinguals activate the codes of both languages when they are reading (Brysbaert et al., 1999; Friesen et al., 2020; Gollan et al., 1997; Nakayama et al., 2012; Timmer et al., 2014; van Wijnendaele & Brysbaert, 2002; Wu, & Thierry, 2010; Zhou et al., 2010). For instance, Brysbaert et al. (1999) reported that in bilinguals it is possible to prime a second‐language word with a homophonic prime from the first language (so, the English target word male is primed by the Dutch word meel in a Dutch‐English bilingual). It is also possible to prime the word female with the Dutch pseudohomophone fiemeel. Van Wijnendaele and Brysbaert (2002) further observed that priming also works from the second language to the mother tongue. In proficient Dutch‐English bilinguals it is possible to prime the Dutch word meel [flower] with the English word male, and the Dutch target word penseel (paintbrush) with the English pseudohomophone pensale. This pattern is found when participants have no knowledge that masked primes are being presented in their second language while they are responding to words in their native language. Gollan et al. (1997) and Nakayama et al. (2012) even reported phonological priming across languages with different scripts, such as Hebrew‐English or Kana‐English.

All in all, there is strong evidence that in alphabetic writing systems, phonology is assembled automatically in the early stages of visual word recognition, and that various possible phonological codes are co‐assembled that can in turn contribute to visual word recognition and reading.