Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 75

In the previous section, we discussed issues related to inconsistencies in grapheme‐phoneme mappings in English. But what happens when words are fully consistent (as in kiss)? Or in languages without inconsistencies? If the written code is fully transparent, is there still a need for speakers to store information about visual word forms in the brain, or is it more economical to assemble phonology and then access stored representations of spoken words?

The idea that visual word recognition may be fully mediated by assembled phonology was defended by Frost (1998) in the strong phonological theory. Frost gave a list of arguments why such an organization would be likely in transparent languages, and might even apply to English, despite the inconsistent mappings for some words. In a way, the strong phonological theory returned to the original question asked by Huey (1908).

Evidence against the strong phonological hypothesis was first reported by Ferrand and Grainger (1994). Using the masked priming task in French, they replicated the phonological priming effect previously discussed: They showed that it is possible to prime the French word MERE (mother) with the homophonic pseudoword mert. In addition, however, they observed that the priming effect was larger for homophonic primes sharing many letters with the target word than for homophonic primes sharing few letters. This is possible in French, because both mert and mair are pronounced like MERE. The priming effect of mert on MERE was larger than the effect of mair on MERE. Furthermore, this orthographic priming effect was particularly strong at short prime durations, whereas the phonological priming effect needed longer prime durations to reach its maximum. These findings point to independent activation of orthographic and phonological information in visual word recognition (see also Adelman et al., 2014; Grainger et al., 2006; Kinoshita et al., 2018; Grainger, this volume).

A second problem for the strong phonological theory is that phonological effects in visual word recognition tend to be small (Brysbaert, 2003; Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006; Vasilev et al., 2019). Powerful experiments are needed to observe phonological priming, whereas orthographic priming is more robust.

A final problem for the strong phonological view is that transposing letters in written words does not affect word processing much, even if the transposition results in large changes to phonology (Perea & Carreiras, 2006; Perea et al., 2011). A striking example comes from Perea and Lupker (2003) who reported that in masked priming, the target word ALWAYS is primed almost as much by neevr as by never, despite the large difference in assembled phonology. This is difficult to explain in a model relying on phonology alone.

In summary, the empirical evidence points to the involvement of both orthography and assembled phonology in the processing of visual words, at least in alphabetic scripts. This view is called the weak phonological theory.