Reading without phonology: ERP evidence from skilled deaf readers of Spanish.

ABSTRACT: Reading typically involves phonological mediation, especially for transparent orthographies with a regular letter to sound correspondence. In this study we ask whether phonological coding is a necessary part of the reading process by examining prelingually deaf individuals who are skilled readers of Spanish. We conducted two EEG experiments exploiting the pseudohomophone effect, in which nonwords that sound like words elicit phonological encoding during reading. The first, a semantic categorization task with masked priming, resulted in modulation of the N250 by pseudohomophone primes in hearing but not in deaf readers. The second, a lexical decision task, confirmed the pattern: hearing readers had increased errors and an attenuated N400 response for pseudohomophones compared to control pse

SUBMITTER: Costello B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7933439 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature