Orthographically Influenced Abstract Phonological Representation: Evidence from Non-Rhotic Speakers

It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of psycholinguistic research 2006-01, Vol.35 (1), p.67-78
Main Author: Taft, Marcus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational Linguistics
Culture
Evidence
Humans
Language
Language Research
Oral Reading
Orthography
Phoneme Grapheme Correspondence
Phonemes
Phonemics
Phonetics
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Reading
Reading Instruction
Resistance (Psychology)
Speech
Suprasegmentals
Syllables
Vocabulary
Vowels
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Summary:It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is orthographically influenced. For example, the claim is made that the word "corn" has an underlying /r/ in its phonological representation, even in non-rhotic dialects. The evidence comes from difficulties observed in judgements about the homophony with a target word of a pseudohomophone whose phonology does not match the putative abstract representation of that word. For example, it is hard to say that the pseudohomophone "cawn" is homophonic with "corn." The conclusion that orthography can shape phonological representation is antithetical to both computational models of the conversion of print to sound and linguistic accounts of phonology.
ISSN:0090-6905
1573-6555
DOI:10.1007/s10936-005-9004-5