PHONOLOGICAL RECODING IN SILENT READING

A comprehension-sensitive proofreading task was used to examine phonological recoding during the silent reading of natural text. In Experiment 1, adult readers identified inconsistent words that were or were not homophones of consistent ones; phonology was implicated by the finding that readers were less likely to detect the inconsistent word in You vile villain to steel my gold! than in You vile villain to stale my gold!, but only if exposed to an error-free version first. Experiments 2 and 3 ruled out working memory and word-specific priming explanations, which suggests that the homophone effect reflected phonological codes activated during lexical access. Although homophony interfered with the initial detection of an inconsistent word, Experiment 4 showed that it facilitated the recovery of the correct solution (e.g., steal). We interpret the homophone effects within the framework of a context-sensitive version of Van Orden's (1987) lexical access model.