Title:
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Studies on reading comprehension in children and adults.
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These studies are an examination of the role of phonological
encoding in pronunciation tasks and in reading for
meaningo The main purpose was to ascertain whether phonological
encoding occurs prior to lexical access by the application
of the rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, postlexically
with the phonological representation of the word
being retrieved from the internal lexicon and used for processing
the meaning of the sentence, or not at all, and whether
the nature of the experimental task affects encoding. In the
first series of experiments young children, poor adolescent
readers, skilled adult readers and deaf children were presented
with different sentences, some of which were meaningful and
some of which were meaningless. Several of the meaningless
sentences became meaningful if they were encoded phonologically
and most of the hearing subjects erred in judging these
sentences. Pronunciation, usage and spelling of homophones
was also tested to investigate whether these could have caused
the homophone effect. In a further set of experiments
children's knowledge of, and their ability to apply the rules
of grapheme-phoneme correspondence was tested by pronunciation,
usage and spelling tasks. Knowledge of the rules benefitted
children in these tasks, but did not help them to decide on
the meaning of sentences containin"g familiar and unfamiliar
words which were either orthographically regular or not. The
general conclusions were that pre-lexical phonological
encoding is necessary for pronunciation tasks, but that reading
for meaning can take place without the reader having first
to encode the sentence phonologicallyo He may do so in
certain situations, and phonological encoding is then likely
to take place post-lexically for the purpose of processing
the meaning of the sentence o Phonological encoding depends
on specific factors such as the nature of the experimental
task, the age and ability of the subjects, and the materials
used for testing them.
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