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Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing pp 161–176Cite as

The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 46))

Abstract

This chapter presents a selective review of evidence about how phonological representations are involved in silent reading. Knowledge of the mapping of orthography onto phonology appears to be important in skilled reading, and this knowledge is applied very early in the process of recognizing words in isolation. The same is true when one is reading sentences and texts, and the creation of a phonological representation of a text appears to play a critical role in guiding the movement of the eyes during reading. Phonological representations beyond the level of the individual word, including prosodic representations, also seem to play an important role in guiding parsing and in integrating discourse.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ashby (2006) found that this facilitation was limited to low-frequency words, suggesting that phonological processing may play a smaller role in recognizing very familiar words.

  2. 2.

    Breen and Clifton 2014 in press, reported that when parafoveal preview of the disambiguating word was prevented, the disruption appeared later, after the disambiguating word was actually fixated.

  3. 3.

    See Jun (2010) for evidence that overt prosody may not have the properties assumed by Fodor’s implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH). In particular, English readers tended to place a prosodic boundary immediately before a relative clause (RC) in an NP–NP–RC configuration. However, as Jun notes, implicit prosody may well be different. See also Jun (this volume).

  4. 4.

    To be sure, factors other than length affect the resolution of the relative clause ambiguity, most saliently, whether the modified noun phrase (NP) is subject or object of a sentence. In the Hemforth et al. research, the often-discussed differences among languages were rather minor, and could be attributed to factors such as how the different languages encode information status.

  5. 5.

    This latter assumption is apparently inconsistent with Clifton and Staub’s (2008) review of the syntactic processing literature that concluded that syntactic ambiguity has no effect on reading time, or even speeds it. It is possible that prosodic disambiguation has a different effect than contextual or morpho-syntactic disambiguation, or that the demand characteristics of the present experiment induced readers to attempt to use the prosody of the preceding speech melody to resolve the ambiguity of the target sentence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Charles Clifton Jr.

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  1. Charles Clifton Jr.
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Correspondence to Charles Clifton Jr. .

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

    Lyn Frazier

  2. Department of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Edward Gibson

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Clifton, C. (2015). The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review. In: Frazier, L., Gibson, E. (eds) Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12961-7_9

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