The Question of Phonology and Reading

of the word is not entirely familiar and requires effortful decoding. First the child says /i . . . i/, then /iz/, then /land/, then /iz land/, and all of a sudden she gets it right: she correctly reads island aloud. English is notorious for words like island, with spellings that only partly reveal how they are spoken. Nonetheless, the way a word is spelled almost always reveals something of how to say it aloud, something of its phonology. This fact illustrates the alphabetic principle, which has long lead scientists to wonder about the role of phonology in reading. For instance, does a printed word’s phonology play a role in deriving meaning from the word? A central question of reading is whether understanding individual written words always depends upon prior access to their phonology: Do mental representations of phonology mediate the comprehension of written words? This question is based on the idea that reading can be taken apart as the links of a chain of mental events. Think again of the 6-year-old child and the word island. Reading island aloud, the effect, seems to depend on an intermediate representation of island’s phonology, its cause. Presented with the visual stimulus island, the child’s mind first forms a representation of the word’s spelling. The spelling representation will be decoded, or puzzled out, to create a representation of phonology. In turn, the mental representation of island ’s phonology activates the motor program of its pronunciation, and the child says island aloud. The child portrayed as reading island aloud illustrates the classic view of stimulus Æ mediating representations Æ response: the idea of a causal chain between the stimulus word island and its pronunciation. It is from this vantage point that the question of phonology and reading is posed. Both the printed word island and island ’s pronunciation appear in some sense to be outside the child’s head, but she constructs phonology inside her head. Phonology is intermediate, both in the sense of a middle position in time or space and in the sense of a mental causal link between the printed word and its pronunciation (cf. Fodor, 1981; Kihlstrom, 1987; Markman & Dietrich, 2000). 4