Phonological decoding and morpho-orthographic decomposition: Complementary routes during learning to read.

We examined the reliance on phonological decoding and morpho-orthographic decomposition strategies in developing and skilled readers of French. A lexical decision experiment was conducted where the critical stimuli were four types of nonwords, all derived from the same base word, such as the French word visage (face) in the following examples: (a) pseudo-homophone (PsH) nonwords (e.g., visaje), (b) orthographic controls for PsH nonwords (e.g., visape), (c) pseudo-morphemic (PsM) nonwords (e.g., visageable), and (d) orthographic controls for PsM nonwords (e.g., visagealle, where alle is not a suffix in French). Responses to PsH and PsM nonwords and their controls were studied in three groups of school children (Grades 1, 2, and 5) and one group of skilled adult readers. PsH interference effects (i.e., more errors to PsH nonwords than to the corresponding controls) decreased during reading acquisition to become nonsignificant in skilled readers. Interestingly, the opposite pattern was seen in PsM interference effects (also measured in terms of accuracy), which were already significant in Grade 1 and increased during reading development to reach their maximum in skilled readers. These results point toward opposing learning trajectories in the use of phonological and morphological information when learning to silently read for meaning.

On the relations between letter, word, and sentence-level processing during reading.

Much prior research on reading has focused on a specific level of processing, with this often being letters, words, or sentences. Here, for the first time in adult readers, we provide a combined investigation of these three key component processes of reading comprehension. We did so by testing the same group of participants in three tasks thought to reflect processing at each of these levels: alphabetic decision, lexical decision, and grammatical decision. Participants also performed a non-reading classification task, with an aim to partial-out common binary decision processes from the correlations across the three main tasks. We examined the pairwise partial correlations for response times (RTs) in the three reading tasks. The results revealed strong significant correlations across adjacent levels of processing (i.e., letter-word; word-sentence) and a non-significant correlation between non-adjacent levels (letter-sentence). The results provide an important new benchmark for evaluating computational models that describe how letters, words, and sentences contribute to reading comprehension.

Searching beyond the looking glass with sandwich priming.

Duñabeitia et al. (NeuroImage 54(4), 3004-3009, 2011) demonstrated that mirror letters induce the same electrophysiological response as canonical letters during the orthographic stage of visual word recognition. However, behavioral evidence in support of such an effect has remained scarce. We hypothesize that the poor reliability of the behavioral data could be due to the lack of sensitivity of the paradigms used in the literature. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we compared conventional and sandwich-masked priming paradigms. Results showed that mirror primes (mirror) produced a significant priming effect on high-frequency words in the case of sandwich priming only. In Experiment 3, we used sandwich priming with a new material set to address a number of concerns regarding prime-target visual overlap. We obtained a graded facilitatory mirror-letter priming effect that acted additively with lexical frequency, thus supporting the idea that it originates in the fast automatic orthographic stage. Given that the graded priming effect provides little support for the idea of the complete preservation of mirror invariance for non-reversal letters, complementary explanations are explored.