Phonological coding in word reading: evidence from hearing and deaf readers.

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nonrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared against response times to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In the first two experiments, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In the third experiment, in which the nonwords were consonant strings, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished aUditory experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality. There is evidence that under some experimental conditions skilled readers with normal hearing access phonological information about the words they read. One such set of experimental conditions has been described by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974). In their procedure, subjects are shown pairs of letter strings to which they respond "yes" if both letter strings are words and "no" if one or both are nonwords. There are four types of word pairs. *Memory ! Cognition, in press. tAlso Dartmouth College Acknowledgment. This research was supported by Grant NS-18010 from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and by Grant HD-01994 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We are grateful to individuals at Gallaudet College who made it possible for us to conduct the research. In particular we wish to thank Drs. Horace Reynolds, Donald Moores, and Pat Cox for their cooperation. We would also like to thank John Richards, Ignatius Mattingly, Rena Krakow, Alvin Liberman, Carol Padden and Nancy McGarr for their valuable discussions regard this research, and Nancy Fishbein, Debbie Kuglitsch, and Beth Schwenzfeier for their help in testing subjects. [HASKINS LABORATORIES: Status Report on Speech Research SR-86/87 (1986)J 223 Hanson and Fowler: Phonological Coding in Word Reading Type 1 words rhyme and are spelled alike except for the first letter (for example, BRIBE-TRIBE). Type 2 words are neither orthographically nor phonologically similar; they are repairings of words of the first type and serve as control pairs for them. Type 3 word pairs consist of words that are spelled alike except for the first letter, but do not rhyme (for example, FLOWN-CLOWN). The fourth type of word pair consists of control words for these nonrhyming pairs. Meyer et al. argued that if word reading were done on a completely visual basis, then the following equation should hold for response times: Type 2 Type 1 = Type 4 Type 3. If, however, there was a phonological influence, then: Type 2 Type 1 ~ Type 4 Type 3. The inequality was upheld in their study. Meyer et al. found a small facilitation effect for rhyming words (Type 1) as compared to control items of Type 2. They found a large interference effect for nonrhyming, orthographically similar pairs (Type 3) as compared with control items of Type 4. Because the rhyming and nonrhyming test pairs were equally similar orthographically, the differential outcome on the rhyming and nonrhyming pairs could be ascribed unambiguously to the differences in the phonological relationship between members of the two pair types. Research sUbsequent to that of Meyer et al. has revealed that this pattern of facilitation and interference is dependent on task variables (Evett & Humphreys, 1981; Shulman, Hornak, & Sanders, 1978). For example, the pattern has been found to be related to the nonword distractors used in the task: When the nonwords are pronounceable nonwords (i.e., "pseudowords"), the pattern obtained by Meyer et al. (1974) is apparent, but when the nonwords are unpronounceable, there is facilitation for orthographically similar word pairs, whether rhyming or nonrhyming (Shulman et al., 1978). These latter findings have been used to argue against the notion of an obligatory phonological mediation in lexical access. However, the interpretation that the response time difference obtained with the procedure of Meyer et al. (1974) is caused by the discrepant phonological representations of the nonrhyming pairs of words remains unquestioned. Our interest in the procedures of Meyer et al. derives from the information they may provide about word reading by deaf individuals. We ask here whether skilled deaf readers are able to access phonological information about a word under conditions in which skilled hearing readers do so. Therefore, any bias that the procedures may introduce toward accessing phonological information will be to our advantage. There are at least two ways in which a prelingually, profoundly deaf reader might acquire information about the phonological forms of words. First, the alphabetic orthography itself provides phonological information. According to some theorists (Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Gleitman & Rozin, 1977; see also Crowder, 1982), the English orthography maps onto the phonological representations of words most directly at the level of the "systematic phoneme," which, putatively, is the level of phonological representation specified in the lexical entries of mature users of the language (but see