Abstract
The role of phonological recoding in children’s reading was investigated by means of a task requiring comprehension of sentence meaning: The child’s task was to decide whether a sequence of printed letter strings was a meaningful sentence or not. Meaningless sentences that are meaningful when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran threw the street”) produced more incorrect responses than did meaningless sentences that remain meaningless when phonologically recoded (e.g., “He ran sew the street”). The difference in error rates between the two sentence types diminished as a function of age. Control experiments showed that these results were not due to visual similarity effects, nor to imperfect ability to spell homophones. It was concluded that very young readers rely extensively on phonological recoding when reading for meaning; as they grow older, reliance on visual encoding becomes progressively more important.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Reference Note
Calfee, R. C., Venezky, R. L., & Chapman, R. S.Pronunciation of synthetic words with predictable and unpredictable lettersound correspondences (Tech. Rep. 71). Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning, 1969.
References
Baron, J. Phonemic stage not necessary for reading.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1973,25, 241–246.
Chall, J.Learning to read: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Clark, H. H. The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1973,12, 335–359.
Coltheart, M. Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In G. Underwood (Ed.),Strategies in information processing. London: Academic Press, 1978.
Coltheart, M. Reading, phonological encoding and deep dyslexia. In M. Coltheart, K. Patterson, & J. C. Marshall (Eds.),Deep dyslexia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Downing, J., &Thackray, D.Reading readiness. London: University of London Press, 1971.
Edwards, R. P. A., &Gibbon, V.Words your children use. London: Burke Books, 1964.
Firth, I.Components of reading disability. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New South Wales, 1972.
Forster, K. I., &Chambers, S. H. Lexical access and naming time.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1973,12, 627–635.
Kucera, H., &Francis, W. N.Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, R.I: Brown University Press, 1970.
Marshall, J. C., &Newcombe, F. Patterns of paralexia.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1973,2, 175–199.
Mathews, M. M.Teaching to read. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Neale, M.Neale analysis of readability. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hams., England: Macmillan Educational, 1967.
Robin, P., Bressman, B., &Taft, M. Do children understand the basic relationship between speech and writing? The mow-motorcycle test.Journal of Reading Behaviour, 1974,6, 327–334.
Schonell, F.Schonell graded word reading test. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1945.
Sebesta, S. L. Artificial orthography as a transitional device in first grade reading instruction.Journal of Educational Psychology, 1964,55,253–257.
Shallice, T., &Warrington, E. K. Word recognition in a phonemic dyslexic patient.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1975,27, 187–199.
Thackray, D. V. Reading for meaning with i.t.a, and t.o. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1971.
Thompson, G. B. Sex differences in reading attainments.Educational Research, 1975,18, 16–23.
Weber, R. M. First-graders’ use of grammatical context in reading. In H. Levin & J. P. Williams (Eds.),Basic studies on reading. New York: Basic Books, 1970. (a)
Weber, R. M. A linguistic analysis of first-grade reading errors.Reading Research Quarterly, 1970,5, 427451. (b)
Wike, E. L., &Church, J. D. Comments on Clark’s “The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy.”Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1976, 15, 249–255.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This research was supported by Social Science Research Council Grant HR/4017/1 to Max Coltheart.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Doctor, E.A., Coltheart, M. Children’s use of phonological encoding when reading for meaning. Memory & Cognition 8, 195–209 (1980). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197607
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197607