Eye-tracking as a window into assembled phonology in native and non-native reading

Abstract

\n The past 30 years of reading research has confirmed the importance of bottom-up processing. Rather than a\n psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967), reading is dependent on rapid, accurate\n recognition of written forms. In fluent first language (L1) readers, this is seen in the automatic activation of a word’s\n phonological form, impacting lexical processing (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Rayner, Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995). Although the influence of phonological form\n is well established, less clear is the extent to which readers are sensitive to the possible pronunciations of a\n word (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1998), derived from the varying consistency of\n grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (e.g., although ‘great’ has only one pronunciation, [ɡɹeɪt], the grapheme \n within it has multiple possible pronunciations: [i] in [plit] ‘pleat’, [ɛ] in [bɹɛθ] ‘breath’; Parkin, 1982). Further, little is known about non-native readers’ sensitivity to such characteristics. Non-native\n readers process text differently from L1 readers (Koda & Zehler, 2008; McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong & Li, 2004), with implications for understanding L2\n reading comprehension (Rayner, Chace, Slattery & Ashby, 2006). The goal of this\n study was thus to determine whether native and non-native readers are sensitive to the consistency of a word’s component GPCs\n during lexical processing and to compare this sensitivity among readers from different L1s.