The role of phonology in lexical access in teenagers with a history of dyslexia

Abstract

We examined phonological recoding during silent sentence reading in teenagers with a history of dyslexia and their typically developing peers. Two experiments are reported in which participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church), pseudohomophones (e.g., cherch), and spelling controls (e.g., charch). In Experiment 1 we examined foveal processing of the target word/nonword stimuli, and in Experiment 2 we examined parafoveal pre-processing. There were four participant groups–older teenagers with a history of dyslexia, older typically developing teenagers who were matched for age, younger typically developing teenagers who were matched for reading level, and younger teenagers with a history of dyslexia. All four participant groups showed a pseudohomophone advantage, both from foveal processing and parafoveal pre-processing, indicating that teenagers with a history of dyslexia engage in phonological recoding for lexical identification during silent sentence reading in a comparable manner to their typically developing peers.