The role of sublexical graphemic processing in reading.
Dual-route models of reading postulate the existence of two separate mechanisms: The lexical route allows words to be recognized in their holistic form, and the sublexical route proceeds by converting the written sublexical entities of a word or a nonword into their corresponding phonological equivalents. Sublexical reading is assumed to require three stages of processing: graphemic parsing, graphophonemic conversion, and phoneme blending. This study provides evidence in favor of the existence of a graphemic parsing process which occurs prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. A group of normal subjects read nonwords which contained multiletter graphemes significantly more slowly than graphemically simple nonwords. These results, best interpretable in the context of a recent dual-route model of reading, confirm previous data obtained in pathology which suggest the functional independence of this cognitive procedure.
Joubert
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Centre de Recherche de l'Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada. jouberts@ere.umontreal.ca
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading