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The Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology
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Phonological encoding in the lexical decision task
Max Coltheart a; Derek Besner b; Jon Torfi Jonasson b; Eileen Davelaar b
a
Birkbeck College, University of London,
b
University of Reading,
Online Publication Date: 01 August 1979
To cite this Article: Coltheart, Max, Besner, Derek, Jonasson, Jon Torfi and
Davelaar, Eileen (1979) 'Phonological encoding in the lexical decision task', The
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 31:3, 489 — 507
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14640747908400741
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14640747908400741
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Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (1979) 31, 489-507
PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING I N T H E
LEXICAL DECISION TASK*
MAX COLTHEART
Birkbeck College,
University of London
DEREK BESNER, JON T O R F I JONASSON AND EILEEN DAVELAAR
University of Reading
I n lexical decision experiments, subjects have difficulty in responding NO to
non-words which are pronounced exactly like English words (e.g. BRANE). This
does not necessarily imply that access to a lexical entry ever occurs via a phonological recoding of a visually-presented word. The phonological recoding
procedure might be so slow that when the letter string presented is a word, access
to its lexical entry via a visual representation is always achieved before phonological
recoding is completed. If prelexical phonological recodings are produced by
using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, such recodings can only occur
for words which conform to these rules (regular words), since applications of the
rules to words which do not conform to the rules (exception words) produce
incorrect phonological representations. In two experiments, it was found that time
to achieve lexical access (as measured by YES latency in a lexical decision task) was
equivalent for regular words and exception words. It was concluded that access
to lexical entries in lexical decision experiments of this sort does not proceed by
sometimes or always phonologically recoding visually-presented words.
Introduction
Access to a store of word-representation, to an internal lexicon, is a major
component of the act of reading. Many of the information-processing tasks which
have been used to investigate reading do not require a subject to access his or her
internal lexicon, since the tasks can be executed successfully without such lexical
access. Examples of such tasks are tachistoscopic report, the Reicher- Wheeler
forced choice task, visual search, same-different judgement, the Sternberg memorysearch task, and reading aloud. Each of these tasks can be performed with letterstrings which are not words and therefore have no lexical entries. Thus when
letter-strings which are words are used, it is possible that subjects sometimes or
always neglect the existence of lexical entries for these stimuli, and perform the
task as if the words were non-words. Whether lexical access occurs during the
execution of these tasks is not a requirement of the task, but an empirical question
*Requests for reprints to Max Coltheart, Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, Malet
Street, London WCIE 7HX, England.
+
0033-5~5~/79/030489 I9
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0 1979 The Experimental Psychology Society
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490
M. COLTHEART E T A L .
(and of course the existence of such phenomena as word-superiority effects may
indicate that words sometimes do receive some form of special treatment).
Considerations of this sort suggest that, if we are specifically interested in the
process of lexical access, we ought to study this process by using tasks which
compel the subject to access his internal lexicon, rather than leaving this optional.
One such task is lexical decision-deciding whether a letter-string is an English
word or not. Provided that all the non-words used for such a task are pronounceable and conform to English spelling regularities, this decision can only be made by
consulting one’s internal lexicon and determining whether the letter-string one is
viewing is present in or absent from this lexicon. How else could a reader decide
that LEAT and SHIVE are non-words whilst LEAP and SHINE are words?
This task was used by Rubenstein, Lewis and Rubenstein (1971) to investigate
the possible role of phonological recoding in lexical access during reading. Two
effects were observed which suggested that subjects were converting visuallypresented letter-strings into phonological representations prior to lexical access.
Firstly, non-words which were pronounced identically to English words (BURD,
BLUD, GROE-we refer to such non-words as pseudohomophones) yielded
slower NO latencies than non-words which were not pronounced identically to any
English words (ROLT, HOSK, WESP). Secondly, post hoc analysis of YES
latencies suggested that homophonic words produced slower YES latencies than
non-homophonic words provided that the homophones were the less frequent
member of the homophone pair; thus WEAK, MAID or THREW, which are less
frequent than WEEK, MADE and T H R O U G H respectively, produce slow YES
latencies, whilst PRAY, RAIN or SAIL do not, since although they are homophones, they have a higher frequency of occurrence than PREY, REIGN and
SALE respectively.
These effects were further investigated by Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson and
Besner (1977), in view of possible difficulties in interpreting the results of Rubenstein et al. Firstly, the NO effect observed by Rubenstein et al. could have
occurred because of differences between their two classes of non-words in visual
similarity to English words. Such effects of visual similarity do occur: for
example, Experiment 2 of Coltheart et al. (1977) showed that NO latency in a
lexical decision task was slower for non-words that can be made into many English
words by single letter changes than for non-words where single letter changes
produce few English words. Rubenstein et al. (1971) did not attempt to match
their two classes of non-words with respect to similarity to English words, and
inspection of their non-words in fact gives the strong impression that their homophonic non-words were of a higher degree of visual similarity to English words than
were their non-homophonic non-words. Coltheart et al. (1977) attempted to
overcome this difficulty by generating from each of their pseudohomophones a
matching non-homophonic non-word which differed by only one letter from the
pseudohomophone: for example, WAID/DAID, FLOO/FROO, and so on.
With such matched sets of pseudohomophones and non-pseudohomophones, the
Rubenstein effect was still obtained; every subject was slower to respond NO to
non-words which were homophonic with English words than to non-words which
were not. It seems correct, then, to conclude that this effect is genuine evidence
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
491
for phonological recoding. Such a conclusion gains further support from the work
of Patterson and Marcel (1977). They studied two patients who had suffered
injuries to the left hemisphere which produce the syndrome of “deep dyslexia”
(Marshall and Newcombe, 1973), also known as “phonemic dyslexia” (Shallice
and Warrington, 1975). One symptom of this syndrome is an inability to carry
out phonological recoding of visually-presented letter-strings without use of the
lexicon. Evidence for such an inability includes the finding that such patients,
when asked to read aloud simple pronounceable non-words such as RUD or
GLEM, cannot do so, although the patients are reasonably successful in saying
such items when presentation is auditory. If the ability to convert visuallypresented letter strings to phonological representations prior to lexical access is in
fact lost in these patients, one can investigate whether the slow NO latencies
produced to pseudohomophones in lexical decision experiments is a genuine
phonological effect, or whether it is due to visual differences between the two
classes of non-words, by repeating the Rubenstein et al. (1971) experiment with
these patients, This is what Patterson and Marcel (1977) did. The two patients
were able to perform the lexical decision task with a high degree of accuracy,
making few false positives; and their NO latencies were no greater for pseudohomophones than for non-homophonic words, whereas a group of control subjects
judging the same set of words and non-words were significantly slower with
pseudohomophonic non-words. Thus the absence of an ability to carry out
phonological recoding of visually-presented letter-strings does abolish the NO
effect obtained by Rubenstein et al. (1971) and Coltheart et al. (1977).
In connection with the YES effect obtained by Rubenstein et al. (1971), it may
be noted that their post hoc analysis of this effect did not control for such variables
as word frequency or part of speech, with influence YES latency in lexical decision
tasks (e.g. Frederiksen and Kroll, 1976; Scarborough and Springer, 1973). For
this reason Coltheart et al. (1977) carried out an experiment specifically designed to
investigate this YES effect by comparing YES times to 39 homophonic words
(each being the rarer member of a homophonic pair) with YES times to 39 nonhomophonic words matched with the homophones on word frequency, number of
letters, number of syllables, and part of speech including inflections. There was
no difference in YES latency to the two classes of word. This disconfirms the
model of lexical access originally proposed by Rubenstein et al., since the model
requires that rarer homophones will produce slower YES responses than matched
non-homophonic words. Nevertheless, clear evidence for phonological encoding
prior to lexical access in the lexical decision task exists, in view of the robustness of
the original NO effect and its absence in deep dyslexia.
However, the relevance of this finding to lexical access during normal reading is
unclear. It is possible, for example, that, although phonological recoding is
occurring during normal reading, and in lexical decision experiments, it is such a
slow process that lexical access using a visual word-representation always finishes
before phonological recoding is completed. In the lexical decision task, on those
occasions when a non-word is presented, the unsuccessful lexical search using a
visual representation may take long enough to allow phonological recoding to be
completed, and hence to allow effects of phonological recoding to become evident.
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492
M. COLTHEART ET A L .
This argument demonstrates that, if our interest is in the possible use of phonological recoding for getting to a printed word's lexical entry, effects on NO
responses in the lexical decision task are uninformative; what we want are effects
on the YES response. Unless such effects are demonstrated, it will always be
possible to argue that phonological recoding has a merely epiphenomena1 role in
lexical access.
This problem can be approached by considering what procedure might be
employed to obtain a phonological recoding of a visually-presented word without
using lexical knowledge. If access to a word's lexical entry is sometimes achieved
by first converting the word to a phonological representation and then using this
representation for lexical access, there must exist some non-lexical procedure for
converting print to phonology. What might this procedure be?
Three possibilities suggest themselves. The most frequently mentioned
possibility is that readers possess and can use a system of grapheme-phoneme
correspondences (GPCs), and that printed words are analyzed into their graphemic
constituents, to each of which the appropriate phoneme is assigned, thus converting
a string of letters into a string of phonemes. A second possibility is that the unit
which is used is the syllable, not the phoneme; printed words are analyzed into
letter-groups corresponding to syllables, and an internal syllabary exists by means
of which a syllable can be assigned to each syllabic letter-group. The third and
final possibility is that no analysis of whole words into subword units is carried out;
the pronunciation of a word as a whole is obtained from a dictionary of wordpronunciations (a phonological lexicon). Given that we are interested in whether
access to a printed word's meaning ever occurs via a prior recoding of the word
into phonological form, we must propose that there are at least two separate and
independent stores of information about words-a phonological lexicon and a
semantic lexicon-if we are to adopt this third possibility. Otherwise, if we
regard a word's lexical entry as a single entity containing both semantic and
phonological information, we cannot make sense of the idea that a phonological
recoding is used to gain access to a word's lexical entry.
These three theoretical approaches to the question of how a reader might go
about the task of deriving a phonological representation of a printed letter string
have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Coltheart, 1978) and it has been argued
there that only the approach based upon GPCs appears to be workable in principle;
also, such evidence as there is appears to be consistent only with this approach.
We will assume here, therefore, that, to the extent to which prelexical phonologic a1
encoding occurs during reading, it is achieved by the use of GPCs."
The GPC procedure, even though preferable on theoretical and empirical
grounds to the other possible procedures, is not without its own difficulties; these
too are discussed by Coltheart (1978) and will be mentioned only briefly here.
The relationship of letters to phonemes in English is sometimes many-to-one.
*We assume that readers do not have available more than one of the three possible mechanisms
for non-lexical phonological encoding. It is, of course, conceivable that readers can use a GPC
procedure and an internal syllabary. We make our assumption through considerationsof parsimony,
and also because of the absence of any positive evidence for any non-lexical phonological encoding
procedure which does not use GPCs.
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
493
Therefore grapheme-phoneme correspondences could not be achieved simply by
assigning a phoneme to each letter in a letter string. There must first be a parsing
of the letter string into those letters or letter-groups each of which corresponds to a
single phoneme, i.e., a parsing of the string of letters into a string of “functional
spelling units” (Venezky, 1970). Examples of such parsings are TH/I/CK,
J/UDG/I/NG and B/R/EE/CH. The relationship of functional spelling units to
phonemes is one-to-one, and therefore a stage of word-parsing can be followed by
a stage of phoneme assignment, in which an internal table of spelling-unit/phoneme
correspondences is used to derive from each spelling-unit its appropriate phoneme.
If this procedure is to work without reference to an internal lexicon, the reader
will need to be able both to parse letter strings into their functional spelling units,
and also to assign phonemes to these spelling units, without using lexical knowledge.
This is impossible, because English is irregular both at the parsing level and at the
phoneme assignment level. Thus no procedures exist which will correctly parse
all English words; and even when a word has been parsed correctly, no procedures
exist which will assign phonemes to spelling units correctly for all English words.
These two problems can conveniently be illustrated with reference to vowel
digraphs. The digraphs AI, EA, OA, OE and UI usually correspond to single
phonemes in English, and hence each of these letter-pairs is normally a single
functional spelling unit; but a parsing procedure which treated them thus would
fail for such words as DAIS, REACT, BOA, POET and RUIN. In each of
these words, the vowel digraph is two functional spelling units, not one. There
are no systematic differences (e.g. in consonant environment) between those words
in which the vowel digraphs are single units and those in which they are two units;
so no parsing procedure can be devised which will work for all of the words of
English containing these vowel digraphs.
But let us suppose this was not true, and that all the words for which the vowel
digraph is a single unit were successfully parsed in this way. The assignment of
phonemes to these single units run into the problems that, for each of these five
digraphs, there are at least two phonemes, and for some digraphs as many as four
phonemes, which could legitimately be assigned (RAID/AISLE/PLAID/AGAIN,
VEAL/BREAD/STEAK, ROAD/BROAD, TOE/SHOE/DOES, CIRCUIT/
BRUISE/BUILD). Once again, there are no systematic differences between
these various words which determine which of the possible phoneme assignments
is correct ; so no phoneme-assignment procedui e can be devised which will work
for all the words of English containing these vowel digraphs.
These difficulties are not confined to vowel digraphs; there are many other
kinds of English words for which no consistent parsing procedure and no consistent
phoneme-assignment procedure exists.
However, Wijk (1966) and Venezky (1970) have provided a data-base from
which one can derive procedures which work for most English words. The
digraphs AI, EA, OA, OE and UI are single functional spelling units in most of the
words in which they occur; and when they are single units, their pronunciations
are almost always, respectively, as in RAID, VEAL, ROAD, TOE and BRUISE.
Any procedure which assumed that this parsing and these assignments held for all
words would fail on some words, but the percentage of words on which it would
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494
M. COLTHEART ET AL.
fail is small. The work of Wijk and Venezky has shown that it is in general true
that one can devise a set of parsing procedures and a set of assignments of phonemes
to spelling units which will work for a large percentage of English words (let us call
these “regular words”) and will yield incorrect phonological representations for the
remainder of English words (let us call these “exceptions”).
It follows that, if one takes the view that the means by which a reader derives a
phonological representation of a printed letter-string without using his interna1
lexicon is to apply a set of GPCs to the string, there exists a set of words (exception
words) for which phonological representations simply cannot be obtained without
reference to the internal lexicon. Thus the demonstrations by Baron and Strawson
(1976) (and by Edgmon: see Gough and Cosky, 1977) of a difference in naming
latencies between regular and exception words provides strong support for the
psychological reality of the GPC procedure. As they point out, the possible use
of GPC procedures for naming visually presented words is confined exclusively to
regular words, whereas the alternative method for obtaining the pronunciation of a
word (namely, looking it up in the internal lexicon) is available equally for regular
and for exception words. The finding that naming latency is shorter for regular
words (which have two potentially available methods for their pronunciation, the
GPC strategy and lexical lookup) than for exception words (which can only use the
lexical lookup method) suggests that GPC procedures do exist and that readers
can use them (for regular words).
Clinical observations support this view. With respect to the syndrome known
as “surface dyslexia”, a reading disorder arising from damage to the temporoparietal
region of the left hemisphere (Marshall and Newcombe, 1973; Newcombe and
Marshall, 1973; Holmes, 1973), detailed analyses of the kinds of incorrect responses
made by the patients when reading single printed words aloud strongly suggest
that they are failing to apply specific GPCs such as “ G and C are soft before E and
I, otherwise hard” and “In the sequence vowel+consonant+final E, the vowel is
long”. Difficulties the patients show in dealing with vowel digraphs suggest
furthermore that the patients sometimes fail at the parsing stage. In addition,
both Shallice and Warrington (personal communication) and Saffran (personal
communication) have observed patients with reading disorders produced by left
hemisphere damage for whom reading aloud is more accurate for regular words
than for exception words.
Thus findings from both normal and disordered reading support the view that it
is by means of the GPC procedure that prelexical phonological recoding of print is
achieved, in spite of the fact that for some words (exception words) this procedure
yields an incorrect phonological code.
If we assume that this view concerning the nature of phonological recoding of
print is correct, then we can reduce the question “Is lexical access during the
lexical decision task ever based on a prior phonological recoding of a visually
presented letter string?” to the question “Are GPC procedures employed by
subjects when they are carrying out the IexicaI decision task?” The use of GPCs
is confined to regular words; when applied to exception words, the GPC procedure
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
495
yields incorrect phonological representations." One can discover whether
performance of a task involves the use of GPCs by determining whether performance
is better with regular words than with exception words. We were thus led to
investigate whether YES responses in a lexical decision task are made more rapidly
with regular words than with exceptions,
Pilot study
I n each of the two experiments reported below, two classes of words are used:
words which conform to GPC rules (regular words) and words which do not
(exception words). The two types of word were selected by referring to the rules
proposed by Wijk (1966) and Venezky (1970). However, in order to ensure the
validity of this selection, a pilot study was carried out to determine whether, with
the sets of words we used, the regular words would be named more rapidly than
exception words, as was found, for a different collection of words, by Baron and
Strawson (1976). Only if this difference is demonstrable can one be sufficiently
confident that one has succeeded in selecting one collection of words which conform
to GPC rules and another which does not.
The words used in Experiment I are listed in the Appendix. These consist of
39 exception words and 39 matched regular words. These 78 words were divided
up into six lists. List I was the first 13 exception words, List 2 the corresponding
first 13 regular words, List 3 the second 13 exception words, and so on down to
List 6 which was the last 13 regular words.
T h e words used in Experiment I1 are also listed in the Appendix. Here there
were 20 exception words. This constituted List 7 in the pilot study. List 8
consisted of the first of each of the set of regular control words of Experiment 11;
List 9 consisted of the second item from each of these sets.
Thus nine lists were used in the pilot study: four of these contained exclusively
exception words, and five contained exclusively regular words. These lists were
typed on nine separate sheets of paper. All nine lists were given, in random order,
to each of 23 undergraduates at the University of Reading. T h e subject was told
that he would be asked to read aloud the list of words as fast as he could. For each
list, the time between exposing the list to the subject and his completion of the
pronunciation of the last word on the list was measured by a stopwatch.
T h e mean time per word for completion of each of the nine lists is shown in
*Here we reject the possibility of lower-priority GPC rules; e.g., when the rule which specifies
that OW is pronounced as in COW fails to produce a word when applied to MOW, we neglect the
possibility than an alternative (less probable) rule, that OW is pronounced as in BOWL, is also
applied. If these two different rules could be applied simultaneously, then exception words, those
to which the lower-priority rules apply, would never suffer relative to regular words, which is
inconsistent with the results of Baron and Strawson (1976). If the two different rules were applied
in order of priority, then exception words would always be dealt with more slowly than regular
words. In this case, to infer from a disadvantage incurred by exception words that GPCs are being
used would still be correct. In any case, hierarchical use of GPC rules with differing priorities
would seem in principle to be unworkable, since when GPC rules are applied to exception words, the
incorrect phonological representation produced is often that of another word (e.g. BREAD becomes
BREED, COME becomes COMB, MOVE becomes MAUVE, GAUGE becomes GORGE, SHOE
becomes SHOW; there are many such examples). How, then, could the system detect the
incorrectness of the phonological representation yielded by application of GPCs to exception words?
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496
M. COLTHEART ET AL.
Table I. In every case, a regular list was completed more rapidly than its matched
exception list. These data were analysed as follows. For each subject the times
taken to complete Lists I, 3 and 5 (which make up the exception words of Experiment I) were summed, as were the times taken to complete Lists 2 , 4 and 6 (which
TABLE
I
Mean time per word in ms for completion of the nine word lists used in the pilot study
Word list
Time (ms)
I
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
470
463
517
499
so4
450
48s
477
453
make up the regular words of Experiment I). Thus each subject was given a total
time for exception words and a total time for regular words. The total times were
significantly greater for exceptions words than for regular words ( t 2 2 = 3 * 6 ~ ,
P
(0'01).
Then the words used in Experiment I1 were analysed by averaging each subject's
times on the regular lists, List 8 and 9, and comparing these regular-word times
with the times needed for List 7, which contained exception words. Again, the
exception words took significantly longer (t,,= 1.87, P <o.os, one-tailed).
Although this difference was significant only with a one-tailed test, the fact that
such a test is defensible here would seem to provide some justification for proceeding with the use of these words in Experiment 11.
This pilot study demonstrates, then, that on the average subjects do take longer
to pronounce the exception words to be used in Experiment I than to pronounce
the regular words; and that this is also true of the exception words and regular
words to be used in Experiment 11. Grounds are thus provided by this pilot
study for the view that our selections of exception words and regular words are
valid.
Further evidence for the validity of the sets of words used in Experiment I is
provided by Shallice and Warrington (personal communication) ; they used these
78 words in testing the single-word reading ability of a patient in whom, other
studies had implied, direct lexical access from print was impaired whilst GPC
ability was not abolished. One would expect this patient, then, to be more
successful at pronouncing the regular words of Experiment I than the exceptions ;
and this was the case.
Experiment I
Method
Subjects
The subjects were 3 1 undergraduates at the University of Reading, paid at the rate of
Eo.50 per hour for their participation. They were run in groups of up to five at a time
(see Apparatus, below).
Stimulus materials
(These are listed in the Appendix). A set of thirty-nine words was chosen for which rules
provided by Wijk (1966)and Venezky (1970) yielded incorrect pronunciations. A large
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
497
variety of forms of irregularity was included (see the column “Exceptions” in the Appendix).
For each of these 39 exception words, a matched regular word was selected. The two
words in any such pair were closely matched for word frequency (Kucera and Francis, 1967),
number of letters, number of syllables, number of morphemes, concreteness/imageability
and part of speech (including inflections). Seventy-eight pronounceable non-words were
also selected.
Apparatus
Five Advance OS250 CROs slaved to a PDP-12 computer were used. Upper-case letter
strings were displayed on these CROs. Subjects were run in groups of up to five, one
subject per CRO. In front of each CRO was a response panel containing two response
outtons.
Procedure
Subjects were instructed that their task was to decide as quickly as they could whether
each letter string which appeared on their display was an English word or not. They were
told that half of the displays would be words, and that the non-words would be pronounceable
and hence would resemble English words. They rested their index fingers on their two
response buttons; the right button was used for the YES response, the left for NO.
A trial began with the presentation of a fixation point for zoo ms. After the fixation
point disappeared, there was a pause of 750 ms. Then a letter string appeared on the
visual display. It remained visible until every subject in the group had responded, and so
each trial was terminated by the response of the slowest subject on that trial. There was
then a pause of 320 ms, after which the next trial began. The 156 words and non-words
were presented in a random sequence, preceded by twenty-four practice trials (12words,
12 non-words).
Results and discussion
Each subject’s data were treated in the following way. Firstly, for the purposes
of the calculations below, incorrect responses were discarded. Then the standard
deviations of the RTs within each of the three stimulus categories (regular words,
exceptions, and non-words) were calculated. Any response which lay more than
3 S.D.S above or below the mean for its category was discarded. This procedure
resulted in the discarding of 1.16% of responses to regular words, 1.08% of
responses to exception words, and 1.24%of responses to non-words. Most of these
were unusually long responses, but some were extremely rapid responses, presumably anticipations. Finally, in the case of words, each item which was paired
with a discarded item in the matching of regular to exception words was itself
discarded. For example, if subject 8’s response to the exception word GAUGE
had been discarded (because it had been incorrect, or more than 3 S.D.S above the
mean of his responses to exception words, or more than 3 S.D.S below the mean)
his response to this word’s regular mate GRILL was also discarded, regardless of
whether it was correct or not, and regardless of whether or not it was unusually
long, or unusually short. This appears to be the logical way of dealing with two
such tightly matched sets of words; it guarantees that for each subject the total
set of exception words producing usable YES responses is still exactly matched to
the total set of regular words, and it guarantees that for each word-pair the set of
subjects contributing to the YES responses with the exception words is identical to
the set of subjects contributing to the YES responses with the regular words.
After carrying out this discarding procedure, the means of the remaining
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498
M. COLTHEART ET A L.
responses were calculated across subjects and across items. These means, and the
error rates, are shown for each stimulus category in Table 11, and a detailed
breakdown of the means for each word is given in the Appendix.
TABLE
I1
Mean RTs for correct YES responses, and error rates, in Experiment I
~
Regular words
Exceptions
539
542
7'9
538
Mean R T over subjects
Mean R T over words
Error percentage
541
8.3
There was a difference of I ms between the mean YES R T to regular words and
the mean YES R T to exception words, whether these means are calculated across
subjects or across words. This difference was not significant; nor did the
difference of 0.4% in error rates between the two word types approach significance
(t3,,=0-65, P >0*05). I n this experiment, then, regular words enjoyed no
advantage over exception words in the time taken to decide that they are words.
Experiment I1
Method
Stimulus materials
The exception words selected for Experiment I were a deliberately heterogeneous group
of words embodying many different forms of letter-sound irregularity. The exception
words used in the second experiment reported here are irregular in a single way, namely,
they all contain vowel digraphs which are pronounced in a way which departs from the most
common pronunciation. Twenty such exception words were selected, and nine different
vowel digraphs were represented in these 20 exception words; the words are listed in the
Appendix.
Lexical decision times for these exception words were to be compared with lexical
decision times for matched regular words. If a single regular word was matched to each of
the 20 exception words, this would produce a set of 40 words, and if there were also forty
non-words, this would result in an 80-trial experiment, which would take about 5 min to run,
including the time needed for instructions. Since it seemed wasteful to run such a brief
experiment, we decided to use several control regular words for each exception word; this
would improve the precision of the comparison between regular and exception words
without resulting in an unduly lengthy experiment. An attempt was made to select four
matched regular words for each exception word, but this was not always possible; for five of
the exception words, only three closely matched regular words could be found, and for one
of the exceptions words only two matched regular words could be found. Thus there were
73 control regular words in all.
The entire list of 93 words is given in the Appendix. For each exception word, the two,
three or four words in its control set were closely matched with the exception word on word
frequency (Kucera and Francis, I977), number of letters, number of syllables, number of
morphemes, part of speech including inflections, and concreteness imageability. A set of
93 pronounceable non-words was also produced.
Another set of non-words (shown in Table I11 below) was also selected for the purpose of
investigating whether those pronunciations of the vowel digraphs which are claimed to be
the most common by Wijk (1966) and Venezky (1970) are in fact the most common when
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
499
subjects are asked to pronounce non-words containing the vowel digraphs. For example, of
the four possible pronunciations of the digraph A1 (RAID, AISLE, PLAID, AGAIN) will
subjects usually choose the RAID pronunciation, said to be the most common, when asked
to say aloud the non-word ZAIB? The items for this test each consisted of a vowel digraph
preceded and followed by a consonant, i.e. were of the form C W C .
When subjects pronounce such non-words, they may do so by relying on analogies with
real words, rather than on GPCs (Baron, 1976). In an effort to minimise this strategy, the
non-words for this test were chosen so that no English word began or ended with the initial
CVV component of the C W C non-word, and no English word began or ended with the
final W C component of the non-word. The Concise Oxford Dictionary was consulted for
deciding whether any English words began with the C W or W C of a non-word, and
Walker's Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language (Dawson, 1973) which is not a
rhyming dictionary but a reverse dictionary, i.e. a dictionary in which the location of a word
depends on the right-to-left order of its letters, was consulted for deciding whether any
English ended with the C W or W C or one of our non-words.
On the assumption that the words BANZAI, KEA, DOAB, AIBLINS, DOAT,
ZOUNDS and ZOUAVE were absent from the vocabularies of all our subjects, the only
analogy available to them was from OUGHT to ZOUG.
Subjects
The subjects were twenty-nine undergraduates at the University of Reading, paid at a
rate of Eo.50 per hour for their participation. They were run in groups of up to five at a
time.
Apparatus and procedure
These were as in Experiment I, except that after completion of the experiment the
subjects were individually tested with the digraph-pronunciation non-word items. Each
item was presented to the subject printed on a card, and he was asked to pronounce it in the
way that it would be pronounced if it were an English word. His pronunciation was
recorded.
Results and discussion
We consider first the results of the non-word pronunciation task. T h e nine
non-words, their regular pronunciation, and the percentage of subjects producing
each of these pronunciations, are shown in Table 111. It is evident that the
TABLE
I11
Percentage of subjects producing the regular pronunciation of each vowel digraph in
Experiment 11
Non-word item
ZAIB
YAUF
KEAJ
ZEWK
DOAB
JOOV
ZOUG
VOE
ZOWF
Example of regular
vowel pronunciation
maid
haul
sea
new
boat
food
couch or soup
toe
now
Percentage of subjects
giving regular pronunciation
72'4
24-1
86.2
93'1
93.1
93'1
93'1
96.6
89.7
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500
M. COLTHEART ET A L .
pronunciations generated by the subject are in fact usually the regular pronunciations, except for the digraph AU, which was frequently pronounced to rhyme with
COW. For the remaining eight digraphs, then, the irregular pronunciations
possessed by the exception words used in the lexical decision experiment do seem
to be the less common forms of pronunciation.
Each subject's lexical-decision data was treated in the following way. Firstly,
for each of the 20 sets of two, three or four regular words used as controls, the
meant R T of the correct responses of that subject within each set was calculated.
From this point on, these 20 means were treated as single RTs matched with the
RTs to the corresponding 20 exception words.
T h e same procedures were then applied to these data as had been used for the
data of Experiment I. T h e percentage of correct responses discarded because
they were more than 3 S.D.S away from the mean was 1.36%. After the discarding
procedure had been completed, the means of the remaining responses were
calculated across subjects and across items. These means, and the error rates,
are shown for the two categories of words in Table IV. A detailed breakdown of the
means for each word is given in the Appendix.
TABLE
IV
Mean RTs for correct YES responses, and error rates, in Experiment II
Mean R T over subjects
Mean R T over words
Error percentage
Regular words
Exceptions
592
587
594
585
10.9
12'2
There was a difference of 2 ms between the mean YES R T to regular words
and the mean YES R T to exception words, whether these means are calculated
across subjects or across words. This difference was not significant; nor did the
difference of 1.3 yoin error rates approach significance (tI8=0.647, P >o.o5).
This experiment produced the same result as Experiment I. There was no
evidence whatsoever that lexical decision times are slower to exception words than
to regular words, nor any evidence that the accuracy of lexical decision is influenced
by whether a word is regular or an exception.
General discussion
T h e difficulty experienced by subjects in responding NO to such pseudohomophones as BRANE in lexical decision tasks, and the absence of this effect in
deep dyslexia, indicates that pre-lexical phonological recoding occurs in these tasks.
If it is accepted that the only workable method by which such phonological
recoding can be achieved is by means of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, as
we argued earlier, then such recoding can only be correctly performed for regular
words. It follows that, if such recoding ever assists the YES response, there
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
501
should be an advantage for regular words over exceptions. We have found no
evidence for such an advantage.”
Thus a somewhat paradoxical situation has arisen : phonological recoding plays
a part in NO responses, but not in YES responses. One way of understanding
this, which we mentioned briefly in an earlier paper (Coltheart et al., 1977) is to
suggest that phonological recoding is a relatively slow process. When a letter
string is a word, its lexical entry is always reached by the visual route before
phonological recoding can be completed, even though such recoding is being
performed, Thus YES responses are always generated via the visual route.
When a letter string is not a word, an unsuccessful attempt at lexical access is
carried out; this takes longer than access to a lexical entry when the stimulus is a
word, and so is still in progress when the phonological recoding has been completed. This allows difficulties caused by pseudohomophones to intrude and to
delay the NO response.
Our conclusion that when a word is presented to a subject in a lexical decision
task access to that word’s lexical entry never depends on a prelexical phonological
recoding agrees with the conclusion reached by Frederiksen and Kroll (1976) but
conflicts with that reached by Meyer, Schvaneveldt and Ruddy (1974). On each
trial in the experiment of Meyer et al. (1974) the subject saw two letter strings
(words or non-words), the second one occurring as soon as a response had been
made to the first. Some of the words had ambiguous grapheme-phoneme
correspondences, e.g. COUCH or BREAK. When such a word was preceded by
another word which contained the same ambiguous letter sequence but with a
different phonemic correspondence (e.g. when COUCH was preceded by TOUCH,
or BREAK by FREAK) the YES response was slower than when there were no
shared letter sequences (e.g. FREAK then COUCH, or TOUCH then BREAK)
and slower than when there were shared letter sequences but no ambiguity (e.g.
BRIBE-TRIBE or FENCE-HENCE). The explanation of this result proposed
by Meyer et al. (1974, p. 317) was as follows: “Suppose that a word like FREAK
has just been processed and that the string of letters B-R-E-A-K is encountered
next. If it is phonologically encoded to rhyme with FREAK, then the resulting
phonological representation will sound like BREEK, and will not be found in
lexical memory. T o avoid an error, the S would have to recode the second string
in the correct phonological representation and check it during another pass through
memory. The repetition would produce relatively long RTs”. According to this
explanation, when a word has more than one possible phonological representation,
these possible representations are tried one after the other, and a NO response
made only after the last representation in this series has been sought unsuccessfully
in lexical memory. Presentation of COUCH before TOUCH increases the
priority of one of the incorrect phonological representations of TOUCH (the one
which rhymes with COUCH) and hence lengthens the time before the lexical
entry for TOUCH is accessed using the correct phonological representation. This
explanation implies, of course, that subjects in a lexical decision task at least
*After this paper was submitted, a report by Stanovich and Bauer (1978) appeared:they found no
regularity effect on lexical decision times with instructions stressing speed, but an effect with
instructions stressing both speed and accuracy.
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502
M. COLTHEART ET A L .
sometimes gain access to the internal lexicon via a phonological recoding of a
visually presented word, since the COUCH-TOUCH effect occurs with the YES
response.
However, the explanation offered by Meyer et al. (1974) appears to be contradicted by anothei feature of their results. In Condition 4 of their second experiment, every second word presented had at least two possible phonological
representations. In Condition 2, less than one-third of the second words had two
possible pronunciations. On the Meyer et al. (1974) hypothesis of serial testing
of phonological representations, subjects would obtain the correct phonological
representation earlier on the average in Condition 2 than in Condition 4, and
therefore would respond YES faster in Condition 2 than in Condition 4. This did
not happen; in fact the YES response was (non-significantly) faster in Condition 4.
A second problem with these data is that when Becker, Schvaneveldt and Gomez
(1973) repeated this experiment using a different set of words, they failed to
observe any slowing of the YES response-subjects were no slower at responding
YES to COUGH when it was preceded by DOUGH than when it was preceded
by MINT. For these two reasons, the results of Meyer et al. (1974) cannot be
taken as strong evidence for the use of phonological encoding when making the
YES response in a lexical decision task.
We have accepted the view that GPCs are used in a naming-latency task-hence
the superiority of regular words over exceptions observed by Baron and Strawson
(1976)-but not for accessing lexical entries of words in a lexical decision task.
Why is it that the two experimental tasks differ in this way?
A first possibility is that the differences between regular words and exceptions in
the naming experiments of Baron and Strawson (1976) do not demonstrate an
effect of the use of GPCs on the latency to begin pronouncing a word. There are
at least two conceivable artifacts in these experiments. Firstly, exception words
may differ from regular words not in naming latency but in naming duration. This
would show up as a difference in the total time needed to utter a list of words,
even if the naming latencies of exception words and regular words did not differ.
Secondly, one could argue that even if naming of words relied exclusively on visual
access to the lexicon, exception words may still suffer, in the following way. If
phonological recoding always lags behind visual access but nevertheless does occur,
at some point during the naming of a list of words the phonological recoding of an
exception word will be completed. If subjects notice that this recoding conflicts
with the way in which they actually pronounced the word (a conflict which would
not occur with regular words), this may disrupt whatever processing they are
carrying out at that moment, even though it is processing of words later in the list;
hence a difference, in favour of regular words, in the time taken to name the whole
list would emerge, even though no difference in individual naming latencies
existed. These two difficulties show that it may be unwise to investigate the
effects of GPC regularity on naming latency by measuring the time needed to
name a list of exceptions or regular words. If individual naming latencies are
measured, both problems are avoided.
In an unpublished experiment by Edgmon, described by Gough and Cosky
(1977), precisely this was done: a set of 56 exceptions and 56 closely matched
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
503
regular words was presented in random order, one word at a time, and individua
naming latencies were measured. Median naming latency was 600 ms for regular
words and 627 ms for exception words, a highly significant difference. A problem
for individual-latency experiments which does not arise for list-reading experiments
is that throat microphones are differentially sensitive to different initial phonemes ;
however, Gough and Cosky report that the words used by Edgmon were matched
on initial phonemes, so that the effect he observed cannot be an artifact of
differences in initial phonemes in the two sets of words.
It should be noted that Mason (in press), measuring individual naming
latencies for the forty regular and forty exception words used by Baron and
Strawson (1976, Table I), failed to find a naming-latency advantage for regular
words. A possible reason for this is that, as Baron and Strawson point out, their
exception words had a higher mean word frequency than their regular words;
since naming latency is inversely related to word frequency (e.g. Forster and
Chambers, 1973;Frederiksen and Kroll, 1976), this frequency difference may have
concealed an exception/regular difference in Mason’s experiment. We will
assume, then, that the finding that regular words have shorter naming latencies
than exception words is not artifactual.
However, even if not artifactual, this result is ambiguous with respect to
theoretical interpretation. Even if we accept that the pronunciation of a regular
word is assisted by the use of GPCs to derive a phonological code of that word, the
naming-latency advantage of regular words could arise in either of two ways, one
non-lexical and other lexical. T h e first possibility is that the phonological code is
converted to an articulatory code and this code is then executed, with no use made
of the word’s lexical entry. The second possibility is that the phonological code
is used for lexical access, and from the lexical entry of the word an articulatory
representation is retrieved and executed. Either possibility would produce a
naming-latency advantage for regular words. Our failure to find a lexicaldecision advantage for regular words, however, suggests that the second possibility
may be rejected, since it appears that lexical access via a phonological recoding is
always slower than visual access; if naming of words were always a lexical process,
then regular words would not be named faster than exception words, since the
phonological access to the lexicon available for regular words would not influence
their naming latencies. Thus, when the naming-latency and lexical-decision data
are taken in conjunction, they suggest that the advantage in naming latency enjoyed
by regular words is contributed by a non-lexical route using GPCs to proceed from
print through phonology to articulation, a route which is irrelevant for tasks
requiring lexical access. An unresolved problem here is that, when exception
words and regular words are intermingled randomly and individual naming
latencies are recorded, as in the experiment described by Gough and Cosky (1977)~
a subject who is employing a non-lexical GPC-based route for pronunciation (in
addition to a lexical route using visual access) would seem to have no way in which
he could avoid deploying this for exception words as well as regular words. This
would produce incorrect pronunciations for exception words on that proportion of
trials where the non-lexical route was completed earlier than the lexical route.
Sometimes, however, exception words are pronounced wrongly in naming latency
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504
M. COLTHEART E T AL.
experiments, and sometimes these wrong pronunciations are those produced by
application of GPCs. This problem clearly needs further attention.
Although our position is not without its problems, then, we suggest that in
naming latency experiments the subject is operating two routes in parallel and
whichever is the fastest on a particular trial is responsible for his pronunciation on
that trial. The first route consists of visual access to a lexical entry followed by
retrieval of an articulatory code from that entry and execution of that code. The
second route does not use the internal lexicon: it consists of the application of
GPCs to a letter string to produce a phonological code, conversion of that code
into an articulatory code, and execution of the latter code. The lexical route is
available equally to regular words and to exceptions, but not to non-words, since
these have no lexical entries. The non-lexical route is available equally to regular
words and to “pronounceable” non-words, but not to exception words, since
these are incorrectly recoded by GPCs. The naming-latency advantage of regular
words over exceptions is due to the use of two parallel routes (with overlapping
distributions of finishing times) vs. only one of these routes. On this view,
regular words should show no latency advantage over exception words in the
lexical decision task, since the route which gives them this advantage is a nonlexical one, and hence irrelevant when the task is lexical decision rather than
naming aloud; and our results provide a demonstration that in the lexical decision
there is no advantage for regular words over exceptions.
T o the extent to which lexical access, as defined by the requirements of the YES
response in a lexical decision task, corresponds to lexical access as the first step in
comprehending single printed words during normal reading, our results suggest
that pre-lexical phonological recoding is not used in normal reading.
This work was supported by Grant HR 4071 from the Social Sciences Research Council.
References
BARON,
J. (1976). Mechanisms for pronouncing printed words: Use and acquisition. In
LABERGE,
D. and SAMUELS,
S. J. (Eds), Basic Processes in Reading: Perception and
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BARON,
J. and STRAWSON,
C. (1976). Use of orthographic and word-specific knowledge in
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BECKER,
C. A., SCHVANEVELDT,
R. W. and GOMEZ,
L. M. (1973). Semantic, graphemic and
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COLTHEART,
M. (1978). Lexical access in simple reading task. In UNDERWOOD,
G. (Ed.),
Strategies of Information Processing. London : Academic Press.
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M., JONASSON,
J. T., DAVELAAR,
E. and BESNER,
D. (1977). Access to the
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DAWSON,
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FORSTER,
K. I. and CHAMBERS,
S. M. (1973). Lexical access and naming time. Journal of
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FREDERIKSEN,
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HOLMES,
J. M. (1973). Dyslexia: A neurolinguistic study of traumatic and developmental
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H. and FRANCIS,
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MARSHALL,
J. C. and NEWCOMBE,
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R. and RUDDY,M. G. (1974). Functions of graphemic and
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F. and MARSHALL,
J. C. (1973). Stages in recovery from dyslexia following a
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K. and MARCEL,
A. J. (1977). Aphasia, dyslexia, and the phonological coding
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H., LEWIS,S. S. and RUBENSTEIN,
M. A. (1971). Evidence for phonemic
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D. L. and SPRINGER,
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M. COLTHEART E T A L .
Appendix
Exception words and regular words used in the four experiments, and mean correct
YES latencies for each word in each experiment
Experiment I
Exceptions
GAUGE
AUNT
LAUGH
BREAK
STEAK
DEBT
PINT
SIGN
MORTGAGE
CASTLE
COME
GLOVE
LOVE
SHOVE
LOSE
MOVE
PROVE
GONE
GROSS
BURY
BOROUGH
THOROUGH
SCARCE
ANSWER
SWORD
YACHT
SURE
BLOOD
FLOOD
COUGH
TROUGH
BOWL
SOUL
BUILD
BISCUIT
CIRCUIT
SUBTLE
SEW
BROAD
Regular words
655
513
534
507
506
551
560
505
604
524
510
573
5 I4
563
535
497
533
528
561
533
602
593
604
527
520
553
488
523
491
576
579
472
527
504
507
553
582
538
571
GRILL
GANG
TREAT
DANCE
SLATE
CULT
PINE
BASE
DISTRESS
SHERRY
TAKE
SPADE
TURN
SHRUG
SAVE
SORT
SPEND
KEPT
QUICK
DUEL
CAPSULE
SPLENDID
STREWN
COUNTY
SPEAR
TROUT
FREE
HORSE
TOOTH
BARGE
THRONG
PLUG
MILE
CHECK
SHAMPOO
PROTEIN
STUPID
RUB
FRESH
507
560
519
509
583
608
514
507
532
518
487
595
506
564
544
526
538
533
5x6
554
602
585
65 5
538
529
544
484
524
536
594
643
523
508
489
556
578
520
533
473
507
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PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING AND READING
Experiment II
~
Exception
words
Regular control words
AISLE
MAUVE
SAUSAGE
AUNT
GAUGE
BREAK
STEAK
SEW
BROAD
CANOE
SHOE
BLOOD
FLOOD
HOOD
WOOL
FOOT
DOUBLE
POUR
BOWL
DISOWN
FROST SPINE SPOON STAIN
BRASH SLEEK
SPANGLE THICKET CUTLASS CURRANT
SOAP GANG GULF HERD
COUCH GRILL SHELF SPARK
CHECK DANCE SIGHT SHAPE
DITCH FLOCK MOUSE SLATE
DIP PRY RIP RUB
FRESH ROUND TERSE
BASIN CABLE CARGO FILLY
BARK FORK HAWK M I S T
HORSE PLANT PLANE
CROWN SLOPE TOAST SPELL
BULB LACE LUMP M I N T
SLUG PORK COIN DRUM
SONG RAIN DUST WINE
ATTEND REDUCE SAMPLE
TOSS YELL HOOT WIPE
DECK LOCK PLUG SINK
BEFELL DEPART ENRAGE REGAIN
~
EXP. 2
(Normal)
Mean of
Exception regular
word
controls
623
724
707
638
664
575
607
566
635
654
525
490
5 20
555
498
522
530
567
544
728
575
661
701
554
560
571
575
570
583
619
573
607
601
555
544
549
5 87
5 87
541
717
This shows the 20 exception words used in Experiment 11, the mean latency of correct
YES responses to each word, and the mean latency of correct YES responses to each of the
sets of regular words serving as control items for the exception words.