Ashby, J., Treiman, R., Kessler, B., and Rayner, K. (2006). Vowel processing during silent reading: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 416–424. DOI 10.1037/0278-7393.32.2.416.
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Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In Experiment 1, the orthographic vowel differed from the target in both the concordant and discordant preview conditions. In Experiment 2, the vowel letters in the preview were identical to those in the target word. The phonological vowel was ambiguous, however, and the final consonants of the previews biased the vowel phoneme either toward or away from the target’s vowel phoneme. In both experiments, we observed shorter reading times for targets preceded by concordant previews than discordant previews. Implications for models of word recognition are discussed.