Speech Analysis During Sentence Processing: Reading and Listening

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with the role of speech recoding during reading. Specifically, it examines information processing with respect to where reading and listening might come to share common mechanisms during comprehension. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section contains a review of evidence related to the issue of whether speech recoding is necessary prior to lexical access. The weight is against this view. The second section of the paper explores an alternative view—namely that speech recoding occurs in working memory, where word units are held in a speech form until comprehension of phrases or sentences occurs. Section three describes an experiment which shows that disrupting word information in memory does not lead to semantic comprehension failure. These results suggest that reading does not occur by converting visual signals into a speech code until comprehension occurs. Finally, general discussion centers on models of visual language processing.