2Does phonological recoding occur during silent reading

Does phonological recoding occur during silent reading,and is it necessary for orthographic learning?Peter F.de Jong *,Daniëlle J.L.Bitter,Margot van Setten,Eva MarinusDepartment of Education,University of Amsterdam,P.O.Box 94208,1090GE Amsterdam,The Netherlandsa r t i c l e i n f o Article history:Received 23June 2008Revised 17June 2009Available online 15July 2009Keywords:Reading acquisition Orthographic learning Phonological recoding Self-teaching Concurrent articulation Silent readinga b s t r a c tTwo studies were conducted to test the central claim of the self-teaching hypothesis (i.e.,phonological recoding is necessary fororthographic learning)in silent reading.The first study aimed todemonstrate the use of phonological recoding during silent read-ing.Texts containing pseudowords were read silently or aloud.Two days later,target spellings were recognized more often thantheir homophone spellings.In both reading conditions,homo-phone alternatives were named faster than nonexposed pseudo-words,suggesting that phonological recoding had occurred.Thesecond study aimed to suppress phonological recoding to demon-strate its necessity for orthographic learning.Lexical decisionswere performed in a standard condition,with concurrent articula-tion,or with tapping.One day later,target spellings were recog-nized less often after lexical decisions with concurrentarticulation.Target and homophone naming speed was notaffected by lexical decision condition.The results support the useof phonological recoding during silent reading and specify its rolein orthographic learning.Ó2009Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.IntroductionAfter a year of reading instruction,beginning readers can often read a substantial number of words fast and accurately.The sight of the written form of such words seems to be sufficient for the imme-diate activation of their spoken form in memory.Such rapid and accurate word identification is com-monly believed to depend on orthographic knowledge,a system of associations between phonology and orthography (Ehri,1998;Perfetti,1992;Share,1995).According to the self-teaching hypothesis 0022-0965/$-see front matter Ó2009Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.06.002*Corresponding author.E-mail address:p.f.dejong@uva.nl (P.F.de Jong).Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(2009)267–282Contents lists available at ScienceDirectJournal of Experimental ChildPsychologyjournal homepage:/locate/jecp268P.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282(Jorm&Share,1983;Share,1995,2008),the acquisition of orthographic knowledge is a two-step pro-cess.First,phonological recoding,the ability to translate an unfamiliar written form of a word into its spoken counterpart,enables a reader to decipher unfamiliar printed words without the help of a tutor. If an unfamiliar printed word has been successfully recoded,this provides an opportunity to establish an association between its written and its spoken form and,thereby,to acquire word-specific ortho-graphic knowledge.Thus,the self-teaching hypothesis makes two important claims.Thefirst claim is that orthographic knowledge can be acquired independently,that is,without explicit teaching.The second,and more critical,claim of the self-teaching hypothesis is that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge is dependent on phonological recoding,being a necessary condition or a sine qua non (Share,1995).There is a considerable amount of empirical evidence supporting the claim that orthographic knowledge is acquired independently(Cunningham,2006;Cunningham,Perry,Stanovich,&Share, 2002;de Jong&Share,2007;Kyte&Johnson,2006;Landi,Perfetti,Bolger,Dunlap,&Foorman, 2007;Nation,Angell,&Castles,2007;Share,1999,2004;see also Share,2008,for a review).Following Share(1999),in most of these studies,beginning readers were required to read aloud short stories without feedback or help of a tutor.Novel words,often pseudowords,were inserted into these stories. Pseudowords with alternative homophone spellings were selected,and in each case only one spelling, the target spelling,was inserted into the text.Because target and homophone spellings have,by def-inition,the same spoken word form,differences in their recognition and reading after story reading would be due solely to differences in exposure to their spellings.Typically,a pseudoword was re-peated between two and eight times in a story,thereby providing several opportunities to acquire orthographic knowledge.The generalfinding of these studies was that some time after independent story reading,target spellings were recognized more often and spelled more accurately than their homophone alternatives.In addition,in some but not all studies(e.g.,de Jong&Share,2007;Share, 2004),target spellings of the pseudowords were named faster than their alternative homophone spellings.There is also some evidence for the critical role of phonological recoding for the acquisition of orthographic knowledge.First,a moderate relationship between decoding accuracy and orthographic learning has been observed(Cunningham,2006;Cunningham et al.,2002;Nation et al.,2007).In addi-tion,dyslexic children,assumed to be poor decoders of pseudowords,have been found to acquire less orthographic knowledge during story reading(Share&Shalev,2004).Stronger evidence is provided by two studies in which the opportunities for phonological recoding were experimentally reduced by the requirement of concurrent articulation during reading(Kyte&Johnson,2006;Share,1999).Concur-rent articulation is a standard technique to suppress rehearsal in verbal short-term memory and to prevent the generation of a pronunciation(e.g.,Baddeley,1986;Baddeley&Hitch,1974).In these studies,target pseudowords were repeatedly presented in the context of a lexical decision task.As predicted,concurrent articulation affected the acquisition of word-specific orthographic knowledge, although not across all measures.The recognition of target spellings was reduced,but the expected decrease in the difference between the naming speed of target spellings and their alternative homo-phone spellings was not found.Currently,most evidence for the self-teaching hypothesis is based on oral reading.We report two studies that are concerned with silent reading,being the more common mode of reading.The major aim of these studies was to pursue whether the buildup of orthographic knowledge during silent read-ing is also critically dependent on phonological recoding.This issue has not been addressed before. However,although phonological recoding is evoked automatically during oral reading because the generation of a pronunciation of the novel letter string is required,its use in silent reading must be demonstrated empirically.Therefore,as a necessary step to evaluate the critical importance of phono-logical recoding,we consider this issuefirst.Direct evidence for the use of phonological recoding during silent reading is difficult to provide,and so far evidence is scarce.Bowey and Muller(2005)argued that,in the paradigm of Share(1999),the recognition and production of target spellings show that orthographic learning has occurred,but the inference that orthographic learning was accomplished through phonological recoding during the si-lent reading is valid only if target spellings are named more rapidly than their homophone alterna-tives.According to Bowey and Muller(2005)the advantage of target naming over homophoneP.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282269 naming implies that‘‘functional orthographic representations that amalgamate graphemic and phonological information”(p.218)have been established.The formation of such associations requires the availability of both the written and spoken forms of a pseudoword.The spoken form must have been generated through phonological recoding.Such an association is not established between the spoken form of the pseudoword and its unseen homophone spelling;therefore,homophone spellings are read slower than target spellings.Bowey and Muller(2005)found both orthographic learning and an advantage in the naming of tar-get spellings over homophone spellings after silent story reading in a study with third graders,afind-ing that was replicated in a subsequent study by Bowey and Miller(2007).In a similar study,de Jong and Share(2007)made a comparison between orthographic learning during silent reading and during oral reading.Similar amounts of orthographic learning were found in both reading conditions.How-ever,de Jong and Share did notfind a difference in the naming speed of targets and their homophone spellings either after silent reading or after oral reading(see Kyte&Johnson,2006,and Share,2004,for similar results in oral reading).In the oral reading condition,the generation of the spoken form of the pseudoword was obligatory.Consequently,the absence of a naming difference between target and homophone spellings during silent reading cannot be taken as evidence that phonological recoding was reduced or even absent.Because of the instability of the target–homophone difference and the difficulty of its interpretation,another method is needed to pursue the use of phonological recoding during silent reading.As an alternative,we examined the difference between the reading speed of exposed pseudowords (target and homophone)and the reading speed of pseudowords that had not been seen before.Follow-ing the reasoning of Bowey and Muller(2005),orthographic knowledge will not have been acquired for both the homophone spellings of exposed pseudowords and novel pseudowords because the spo-ken form of both types of pseudowords has never been associated with the written form.However,if phonological recoding was used during silent reading,then a phonological representation is generated and this spoken form is,by definition,the same for the target and the homophone spelling of an ex-posed pseudoword.Thus,if phonological recoding has been used,the difference in the reading of a homophone spelling and the reading of a novel pseudoword is the availability of a phonological rep-resentation of the pseudoword.Severalfindings suggest that the availability of a phonological representation of a(pseudo)word facilitates reading(McKague,Pratt,&Johnston,2001;Reitsma, 1983).The importance of the availability of a phonological representation for reading is also exempli-fied by the pseudohomophone effect.A pseudohomophone,such as brane,is read faster than a matched control word,such as brate,and this effect has also been demonstrated in children(e.g., Bosman&de Groot,1996;Goswami,Ziegler,Dalton,&Schneider,2001;Johnston&Thompson, 1989).The pseudohomophone effect indicates that phonological information at the whole-word level facilitates pseudoword reading.Further evidence for the beneficial effect of an existing phonological representation is provided by research on long-term priming effects.Such effects are stronger when the study and test words are presented in the same modality(usually visual–visual)than when modality is changed(from verbal to visual)between study and test(e.g.,Havelka,Bowers,&Jankovic, 2006).However,a change of modality does not eliminate the priming effect;rather,it only tends to reduce the effect(Havelka et al.,2006).This suggests that the visual–visual long-term priming effects are due partly to the generation or activation of a phonological representation.In sum,we reasoned that if phonological recoding during the reading of a pseudoword inserted into the text has been employed,then a phonological representation of this pseudoword should have been formed.Accordingly,the difference between the homophone spelling of the exposed pseudoword and that of a pseudoword that was not exposed in the text is the availability of a phonological represen-tation.Therefore,we expected that if phonological recoding has been used,then homophone spellings will be read faster than nonexposed pseudowords.This hypothesized difference between the reading of homophone spellings and that of novel pseudowords was used in two studies to test the use and critical importance of phonological recoding for the acquisition of orthographic knowledge during si-lent reading.In thefirst study,we compared orthographic learning in second-grade readers during silent and oral story reading.Orthographic learning was examined afterward with a naming task consisting of target pseudowords,their homophone spellings,and pseudowords that had not been inserted into270P.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282the stories.In the oral reading condition,we also assessed decoding performance of the target pseudo-words.In earlier studies with English children,decoding performance appeared to be moderately re-lated to orthographic learning(e.g.,Bowey&Miller,2007;Cunningham,2006;Cunningham et al., 2002;Nation et al.,2007).The current study involved beginning readers of Dutch,a much more trans-parent orthography than English.In a second study,we examined whether the phonological recoding that takes place during silent reading is critical for the acquisition of orthographic knowledge.Following earlier studies on oral reading(Kyte&Johnson,2006;Share,1999),we aimed to suppress phonological recoding during reading by concurrent articulation.We expected that if phonological recoding is critical,then its sup-pression should hamper orthographic learning because the generation of spoken word forms would be more difficult.In addition,we expected that the difference between the reading speed of homophone spellings and that of novel pseudowords would be smaller in the suppression condition than in the reading condition without concurrent articulation.Study1MethodParticipantsA total of56Dutch second graders(24boys and32girls)participated in the study.All but2chil-dren were native speakers of Dutch.The ages of the children ranged from7years7months to8years 11months,with a mean age of8years2months.The study was conducted toward the end of the school year.Pairs of children were matched on age,gender,native language,and word reading efficiency.The latter ability was measured with the One-Minute Test(Brus&Voeten,1979),which is regularly used in Dutch education to assess reading achievement.The test measures the number of words read cor-rectly within1min of a list of words of increasing difficulty.The children of each pair were randomly assigned to the silent and oral reading conditions.One girl became ill during the study,resulting in27 children in the silent reading condition and28children in the oral reading condition.The self-teaching taskTexts.In both reading conditions,the children had to read six short expository texts in which target pseudowords were inserted.Within the stories,the target pseudowords were repeated three or six times.The texts were the same as in the study by de Jong and Share(2007).The texts contained be-tween16and21sentences(116–132words).With occasional exceptions,each sentence started on a new line.The six stories were read on the same day:three in the morning and three in the afternoon. Two days after story reading,orthographic learning was assessed.Target pseudowords.The target words were one-syllable pseudowords with two alternative homo-phone spellings.A total of24pairs of homophonic pseudowords were selected from a larger pool of 40pseudowords that had been administered as a spelling preference test to an independent sample of26third graders.Of the24pairs,12pairs were used previously in the study by de Jong and Share (2007).From the24pairs,two sets of12pairs were formed,matched on number of phonemes and letters and type of alternative spellings:ou–au(4times),ei–ij(4times),t–d(2times)and g–ch(2 times).In addition,the four lists(two sets by two alternative spellings)were matched on mean pref-erence for the particular spellings of the pseudowords in the list over the spellings of the homophone spellings in the other list,which was always very close to50%.Within conditions,the four lists were (randomly)counterbalanced over participants.The lists of pseudowords are presented in the Appendix.Each text contained two target words.One of these target words was always given three times, whereas the other occurred six times.Accordingly,the target words were not balanced over frequency of exposure(three or six times).Instead,the pseudowords with three and six exposures were matched on number of phonemes and letters and type of alternative spellings.P.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282271Reading procedure.The children were asked to read the stories.Each story was printed on a separate page.The experimenter mentioned that the time to read each story would be recorded but that com-prehension was more important than reading speed.The children were told that questions would be asked after each story.The experimenter provided the title at the start of a story,and then the children were required to read the story.If the children asked for help,they were encouraged to try again and,if they were still unsuccessful,to skip the word.The children were told to turn the page when they had finished reading.Measures during the self-teaching taskOn each story,the decoding accuracy of the target words(only in the oral reading condition),the time needed to read the story,and the comprehension of the story were assessed.Target pseudoword decoding accuracy.This was assessed in the oral condition only.A score of1was given each time a target was read correctly.The total score was the sum over the12target pseudowords.Reading speed.This was recorded with a stopwatch.Recording started the moment the experimenter instructed the children to start reading and ended the moment the children turned the page.For each child,a mean reading speed score was computed over the six texts.Reading comprehension.Immediately after each text,three comprehension questions were asked. Most questions concerned factual knowledge that was related to the pseudoword.However,to avoid pronunciation of the pseudowords,they were not mentioned in the questions and the answers to the questions did not require their naming.For example,in the story about a clown with thefictitious name wog,we asked what the clown looked like,what his hat looked like,and why he could notfind his hat.For each correct answer,1point was allotted.The maximum score was18.Orthographic learningOrthographic learning was assessed2days after the self-teaching task with an orthographic choice task and a naming task.Orthographic choice.For each of the12target pseudowords,both homophone spellings were pre-sented.The children were required to choose the spelling of the pseudoword that had been presented in the stories.The maximum score was12.Naming.This task required children to read aloud the four lists of pseudowords(two sets of pseudo-words by two homophone spellings).Note that only one of these lists,the target list,was presented in the stories.The other lists were the homophone spellings of the pseudowords in the target list and the two homophone spellings of the set of pseudoword pairs that were not inserted into the stories read by a particular child.The pseudowords were presented in random order on a notebook computer.To prevent two mem-bers of a homophonic pair from being presented one after the other,two blocks of24pseudowords were formed.The pseudowords of a pair were always presented in different blocks.The blocks were presented immediately after each other.The order of the blocks was random.The task was programmed in E-Prime(version1.0)(Schneider,Eschman,&Zuccolotto,2002). Each pseudoword was presented in72-point Arial font in black letters on a white background in the middle of a14.1-inch screen.A trial started with a plus sign(+)in the middle of the screen to focus the children’s attention.The stimulus word appeared750ms after the plus sign and disap-peared as soon as the voice key was triggered.A voice key registered responses,measuring the time from target onset to response onset.After each response,the experimenter scored the reading accu-racy of the pseudoword on a response box(correct,incorrect,or invalid if the voice key had not been activated properly or had been triggered by another sound).Then the next plus sign would ap-pear on the screen.272P.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282ResultsThe results are presented in three subsections.First,we report the results on decoding accuracy, reading speed,and reading comprehension during the reading of the stories.Next,we present the main results on orthographic learning during oral and silent reading.In thefinal subsection,we pres-ent the relationships of target decoding accuracy with orthographic learning.Reading accuracy,speed,and comprehension during text readingDuring story reading,we recorded the proportion of pseudowords read correctly,story reading speed,and reading comprehension.The mean proportion of target pseudowords that were read cor-rectly during oral story reading was.86(SD=.12).It was not possible to determine this proportion in the silent reading condition.The proportion correct was virtually identical for target pseudowords with three and six exposures(three exposures:M=.86,SD=.14;six exposures:M=.87,SD=.14).Reading speed was faster during silent reading than during oral reading(silent:M=70.77, SD=30.14;oral:M=83.85,SD=34.39).The score distribution of text reading speed was skewed. Therefore,the scores were transformed by taking the inverse of the speed scores.A t test on the trans-formed score revealed that the reading speed in the oral reading condition was significantly slower than in the silent reading condition,t(53)=2.23,p<.05.On the reading comprehension questions,we found that the proportion of correct answers was higher in the oral reading condition than in the silent reading condition(oral:M=.67,SD=.15;silent: M=.56,SD=.20).This difference was confirmed by a t test,t(53)=2.13,p<.05.Orthographic learningThe proportions of correct responses on the orthographic choice task for each reading condition (oral or silent)and target exposure frequency(three or six occurrences)are presented in Table1. The proportion correct scores were subjected to a multivariate analysis of variance(MANOVA)for re-peated measures with reading condition as a between-participants factor and with exposure fre-quency as a within-participant factor.We found a significant effect of exposure frequency, F(1,53)=4.10,p<.05,g2p=.072.Importantly,the effects of reading condition and the interaction of reading condition by exposure frequency were not significant.The significant effect of exposure fre-quency indicated that the mean proportion correct was higher after six exposures than after three exposures of the target pseudoword.The mean proportion correct after six exposures was.62 (SD=.17),which was significantly above chance level,t(54)=5.16,p<.001,whereas the mean propor-tion after three exposures was.55(SD=.21),which was just above chance level,t(54)=1.68,p<.05 (one-tailed).On the naming task,accuracy and naming speed scores were computed for each spelling(target or homophone)by exposure(three or six times)condition.Recollect,however,that each child was ran-domly assigned to one of the two pseudoword sets.For each particular child,one set(targets or homo-phones)was used for the story reading,whereas the other set was used as the novel pseudoword set in the naming task.The two word sets were matched;accordingly,for each child,four spelling by expo-sure scores could also be computed for the novel pseudowords.Of course,we did not expect any mean differences among the four novel pseudoword reading scores,but they could serve as a baseline.This seemed to be especially important because assignment to the three and six exposure condition was not random.The three and six exposure pseudowords were only matched.As an additional advantage, we could test the difference in naming speed and accuracy between the exposed pseudowords and the novel pseudowords in one MANOVA.Table1Mean proportions of correct and standard deviations on the orthographic choice task of Study1.Exposures Oral reading Silent readingM SD M SDThree.56.21.54.22 Six.61.17.63.17P.F.de Jong et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psychology104(2009)267–282273 Mean reading accuracy across the various spelling by exposure by reading conditions ranged from .93to.96correct.The differences among the conditions were negligible.For the novel pseudowords, the mean accuracies ranged from.90to.97.For the computation of the naming speed scores,we omitted trials with voice key errors,with latencies below325ms,and with response times that were3standard deviations above the child’s general mean response latency(Tabachnick&Fidell,2001).Next,the latencies were converted into pseudowords per second because the distributions of latencies are often heavily skewed(Ratcliff, 1993).Naming speed scores per condition were based on correctly read and valid trials only.Mean naming speed scores for each condition for the exposed pseudowords and the novel pseudo-words are presented in Table2.Differences among the conditions were examined with a MANOVA for repeated measures with type of spelling(target or homophone),exposure frequency(three or six times),and word set(exposed or novel pseudowords)as within-participant factors and with reading condition as a between-participants factor.We did notfind any significant effect of reading condition. The only significant effects were for word set,F(1,53)=25.69,p<.001,g2p=.33,indicating that novel pseudowords were named significantly slower than exposed pseudowords,and for the interaction of word set and type of spelling,F(1,53)=4.34,p<.05,g2p=.076.Follow-up contrasts were specified to examine the word set by type of spelling interaction.As ex-pected,target pseudowords were named significantly faster than homophones for exposed pseudo-words,F(1,53)=5.81,p<.05,g2p=.099,whereas the difference between alternative spellings was not significant for the novel pseudowords,F<1.The significant main effect of word set in this analysis concerned the comparison of the mean nam-ing speed of the novel pseudowords with the naming speed of target and homophone spellings.A fol-low-up contrast was specified to pursue the difference between the mean naming speed of the novel pseudowords and the homophone spellings because this was an important prediction.This contrast was significant,F(1,53)=12.73,p<.01,g2p=.194.As predicted,the(previously unseen)homophone spellings were named faster than the novel pseudowords.Target decoding accuracy and orthographic learningWe examined the correlations between target pseudoword decoding and the various measures of orthographic learning.Orthographic learning involved performance on the orthographic choice task and target naming.However,we also included the naming speed of the homophone spellings and the naming speed of the novel pseudowords.The latter concerned the mean naming speed score over all novel pseudowords.Because there were no mean differences in orthographic learning between the reading conditions,and the patterns of correlations in both reading conditions were similar,the cor-relations were computed over the full sample.The correlations are presented in Table3.Severalfindings are of interest.First,the correlations of orthographic choice and the various nam-ing tasks were low and not significant.The correlations among the various naming measures were significant and very high irrespective of whether the naming tasks involved target,homophonic,or novel pseudowords.Second,target decoding was,as expected,significantly correlated with ortho-graphic choice.Also,the relationships of target decoding with the target and homophone namingTable2Mean reading speed and standard deviations of target and homophone spellings by exposure frequency(three or six)and reading condition(oral or silent)for exposed and novel pseudowords in Study1.Exposures Oral reading Silent readingTarget Homophone Target HomophoneM SD M SD M SD M SDExposed pseudowordsThree 1.310.39 1.290.35 1.270.46 1.260.43 Six 1.320.33 1.260.30 1.310.45 1.260.50Novel pseudowordsThree 1.250.37 1.240.33 1.220.45 1.190.47 Six 1.220.39 1.250.32 1.160.45 1.200.46。