Editorial: Bridging Reading Aloud and Speech Production

The study of how people can speak or read started from the beginning of the modern era of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics (e.g., Lichteim, 1885; Huey, 1898) and continues to this day. However, the two lines of research—speech production and reading aloud—have followed two separate and parallel paths: While they both concern language production, they seldom meet. Both have produced detailed descriptions of cognitive mechanisms underlying the processes that goes from the message planning to its articulatory realization, but they generally have little contact with each other. Given their long and fruitful history, this parallel and separate courses of the two research traditions is quite surprising. Everyday experience suggests that speech production and reading aloud do have something in common: In both cases the endpoint is to utter the same linguistic units (saying the word table and reading aloud TABLE will produce the same acoustic material). This suggests that the processes of speech production and reading aloud may not be totally independent: There must be some shared processes at least in terms of generation of phonology and preparation of a motor speech response. The aim of the present research topic is to point the magnifying glass on this issue and to address questions such as the following: To what extent are speech production and word reading/reading aloud similar? Are there some shared components and/or mechanisms between the two process? Is the time course of the (supposed) shared mechanisms activation similar in the two processes? How does the different input (conceptual vs. orthographic) interact with the types of information that reading and speaking share? Our call has resulted in 12 excellent articles (9 original research, 1 mini review, 1 opinion, 1 perspective article) that provide a first answer to the above questions and provide the impetus for future research. Three articles address the issue of similarity and differences between the processing stages and components of speech production and reading. Valente et al. inspected the spatio-temporal segmentation of ERPs in response to picture naming and word reading and shown that the two tasks are highly similar from 250 ms onward, which is an index of a shared phonological processing stage. Topographic similarities emerged also between 75 and 150 ms, suggesting similar visual processes, although of variable intensity, between the two tasks. Converging evidence for a shared phonological processing comes from Givon and Friedmann who studied patients with phonological output lexicon anomia: They demonstrate …