Notes on Reading vs Spoken Language: Processes, Research Methods, and Phonology
Overview
Lecture comparing reading and spoken language to build understanding of reading processes and speech perception later in the course.
Goal: understand what reading is, how it’s investigated in research, and the terminology used in reading research.
Emphasis on bridging reading and spoken language concepts so competent language users understand both modalities, regardless of whether information is heard or read.
Preview: you’ll learn why reading research often treats reading and speaking as separate components and how they can be integrated.
Reading vs Spoken Language: Similarities and Differences
Similar core message: competent adults understand messages in both modalities (written vs spoken).
Key differences highlighted:
Word boundaries: written text clearly separates words (spaces); spoken language lacks explicit word boundaries due to continuous speech.
Co articulation and speaker variability: reading uses your internal representation of words; spoken language involves pronunciation differences across speakers and coarticulation effects.
Memory load: reading reduces memory load because the words remain on the page/screen; spoken language requires holding information in working memory as it’s heard.
Punctuation vs prosody: punctuation guides reading and interpretation in writing; prosody (pitch, stress, intonation) guides interpretation in speech.
Absence of speech-reading cues in reading: you don’t have facial expressions or voice tone to infer meaning from text, unlike listening to speech.
Developmental and age-related differences: reading and spoken language abilities develop differently; reading ability often depends on prior spoken language skills.
Practical implication: while there are shared processing components, researchers often separate reading and spoken language for clarity, then later integrate them.
Terminology: Orthography vs Phonology
Orthography: the letters on the page or screen; the visual representation of language (graphemes).
Phonology: the sounds of language; phonemes are the individual sounds.
Relationship: a mapping exists between orthography (letters) and phonology (sounds), but English has not a strict one-to-one correspondence; some letters or letter combinations map to multiple sounds.
Alphabet and sound mapping:
English features many irregularities: gh can be silent or pronounced differently; o u g h has 6–8 possible pronunciations depending on context.
Examples discussed: a can sound like /a/ as in "cat" vs /æ/ in some dialects; oo can be /uː/ as in "soon" or /ʊ/ in other contexts; ck typically /k/; gh can be silent or /f/ in some words; ch can be /tʃ/ as in "chair"; and various mismatches like A sometimes sounding like R in certain spellings.
Phoneme awareness (phonemic awareness): schooling to map sounds to letters, starting with simple words (e.g., cat → /k/ /æ/ /t/), then rhymes (fat, sat, bat) and invented words (e.g., blat).
Key teaching point: in English, some sounds have close letter-sound mappings, while others do not; learners are taught to map sounds to letters through explicit instruction.
Reading vs Language Development: Language Learning and Access to Curriculum
Reading leverages spoken language as a gateway to literacy.
Access to the curriculum is often via reading; reading ability builds on prior spoken language skills.
Variation in learning trajectories: individuals’ reading ability is largely predicated by their spoken language proficiency.
How Reading is Studied: Approaches and Methodologies
The literature often uses five main approaches to probe reading processes:
1) Lexical decision tasks: decide quickly whether a string of letters is a real word or not (real words vs non-words).
2) Naming tasks: read words aloud to examine pronunciation and access to phonology.
3) Eye-tracking: monitor where and for how long readers fixate; reveals processing difficulty and how much backtracking occurs to re-check words.
4) Priming studies: present a prime word before a target word; primes can be related in spelling, meaning, or sound to influence processing.
5) Neuroimaging/electrophysiology: cap-and-electrodes to measure brain activity during reading; focus on components like N400 and P600.Brain measures:
N400: negative deflection ~ after a word is encountered, linked to semantic processing.
P600: positive deflection ~ after word perception, linked to syntactic/structural processing.
Literacy Education, Phonology, and Phonological Awareness
Phonology (sound system) overview:
New Zealand English has roughly phonemes, typically consonants and vowels.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) catalogs all possible sounds; sounds mapped by place of articulation, voicing, and manner (stop, fricative, etc.).
The video on NZ English emphasizes that the spoken inventory is larger than the 26 letters of the alphabet; multiple letters or letter combinations map to a single sound.
Phonological awareness in early reading:
Children learn to segment words into phonemes and understand correspondences between sounds and spellings.
The progression: learn simple words → build phoneme awareness → read more complex words (catapult, catastrophe) by combining phonemes.
Phonics vs other approaches:
Phonics emphasizes explicit letter-sound mappings; historically, it’s been linked to faster initial decoding but can be overly prescriptive and memory-heavy if overemphasized.
A balanced view recognizes the role of phonology in reading across the lifespan, including adult reading, and the importance of keeping meaning central to reading.
Reading development and research context:
There is a critical program in New Zealand (Better Start Literacy Project) that emphasizes explicit foundational skills for reading to support later reading-to-learn.
The shift in education: from learning to read (early years) to reading to learn (later schooling), usually around age years.
Inner speech in reading:
Many readers report a form of inner speech (auditory imagery) during silent reading; evidence suggests phonological processing is engaged even when reading silently.
A notable study using limericks showed phonology is engaged in silent reading and is affected by regional accents (e.g., Bath vs path pronunciations) and by tongue-twister complexity.
Silently reading and phonology across accents:
A limerick study compared readers from the North of England vs the South; differences in rhyming pronunciation influenced eye movements, indicating phonology is accessed during silent reading.
Tongue twisters cause more fixations and longer processing times during silent reading, indicating phonology involvement even without vocalization.
Phonological neighbors and priming in reading:
Phonological neighbors: words that differ by one phoneme (e.g., gate with neighbors bait, got, get).
Experiments show processing is influenced by neighbors and their similarity; if a neighbor is a word and shares phonology, reading can be more difficult in some conditions (e.g., CLIP vs KLIP example).
Phonological priming speeds up reading when primes align with expected phonology, suggesting phonology facilitates early decoding and word recognition.
Homophones and phonological processing:
Studies show more errors or slower responses when target words have phonological neighbors that sound alike (e.g., rows/rose) than when they don’t.
In reading sentences, phonology can influence processing even when spelling differs (e.g., “made” vs “maid” in a sentence) as readers’ brains detect phonological similarity.
Phonology in deaf readers:
Even profoundly deaf readers engage phonological processing during reading, suggesting phonology-like representations may be internalized through alternative modalities (e.g., lip-reading, sign language) or auditory-imagery analogs.
Implications for research and theory:
The data collectively suggest phonology plays a central role in reading across modalities and populations, not just in early literacy but also in skilled adult reading.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Speech Sounds
The purpose of IPA: a universal chart showing how to pronounce sounds across languages, organized by place and manner of articulation.
Relationship to reading: understanding phonemes helps with decoding and spelling; reading instruction often uses phonetic awareness to map sounds to letters.
Place, voicing, and manner dimensions:
Place: where in the mouth or vocal tract the sound is produced (labial, dental, alveolar, etc.).
Voicing: whether the vocal cords vibrate (voiced) or not (voiceless) when producing a sound (e.g., /p/ vs /b/).
Manner: how air is constricted (stop, fricative, etc.).
Important phoneme examples for teaching:
P vs B: voiceless vs voiced stops; feel v. sound with a finger on the throat.
T vs D; K vs G; distinction between voiceless and voiced counterparts.
Practical takeaways for learners:
Understanding phoneme production helps in decoding difficult spellings and in phonological awareness tasks.
Dialect and accent variations alter phoneme realizations, which can affect reading strategies.
The Wacky Reading Demonstration and What It Teaches
A widely circulated example shows that people can read text with jumbled interior letters as long as first and last letters are in place.
Important caveat: this claim is not a reliable scientific citation to Cambridge University; it’s a popular anecdote with questionable provenance.
Takeaway for reading research:
Word recognition relies on both holistic shape/letter patterns and sub-lexical (phonological) processing; readers often use a combination of cues, not just letter-by-letter decoding.
Caution in interpretation: avoid overgeneralizing from a single demonstration; research shows multiple routes to word recognition depending on context and reader experience.
Phonology in Reading: Experimental Evidence and Insights
Inner speech in reading:
Many adult readers access their phonology when reading, even silently; eye-tracking and self-reports indicate phonological processing during silent reading.
Accent and regional variation studies:
North vs South England differences (Bath vs path) influence how readers process rhymes and verse; this reveals that readers implicitly simulate phonology during reading.
Tongue twisters and silent reading:
Silent reading of tongue twisters leads to more errors and slower reading, suggesting phonological processes are engaged even without vocalization.
Phonological neighbors and reading difficulty:
When a target word has a highly similar phonological neighbor that is a real word, processing can slow down due to competition at the phonological level.
If the neighbor is not a real word, processing can be eased, indicating that lexical status of neighbors matters.
Phonological priming in reading:
Primes related by phonology can speed up recognition of subsequent words, highlighting the speed and automaticity of phonological activation during reading.
The role of phonology for reading speed and comprehension:
Evidence suggests phonological processing speeds up reading when consistent with expectations, and may be essential for efficient reading, not just a byproduct.
Deaf readers and phonology:
Even individuals with profound hearing loss show evidence of phonological processing in reading, indicating robust phonology-like representations beyond acoustic hearing.
Reading Education: Foundations, Phonology, and Foundations of Literacy
Phonological awareness as foundational skill:
Explicit teaching of sounds and their relationship to letters supports decoding and spelling.
Better Start Literacy Project (University of Canterbury context):
A funded program focusing on foundational literacy development to improve later reading outcomes.
From learning to read to reading to learn:
Early years emphasize decoding; around ages , students transition to reading for understanding, learning from texts across subjects.
Phonics: historical and modern views:
Phonics-to-decode approach emphasizes letter-sound correspondences but can be memory-intensive if misapplied; recent perspectives advocate a balanced approach integrating decoding with meaning-making and prior linguistic knowledge.
The cognitive steps in reading development (how decoding becomes reading for meaning):
Phoneme identification and phonological storage in the mental lexicon.
Decoding (sounding out) words to access their meanings.
Encoding, retrieval, and lexical access as part of reading aloud.
Greater integration as vocabulary and syntax knowledge improve.
The Role of Phonology in Adult Reading and Silent Reading
Inner speech: many readers report hearing inner voices while reading; experiments show internal phonological activation supports comprehension.
Practical implications for reading instruction and literacy assessment: recognize that even advanced readers rely on phonological processing, so phonology training can benefit lifelong reading proficiency.
The IPA, Phonemes, and Spelling Patterns: Practical Details
NZ English sounds overview (from a common educational clip):
Total sounds: (depends on dialect)
Consonants: ; Vowels:
Letters in the alphabet: 26; therefore, multiple-letter spellings represent the same sounds.
Spelling patterns: about common patterns; about total patterns used in representing sounds.
How reading instruction uses phonology:
Clear and pure articulation of sounds helps beginning and struggling learners hear and use correct sounds.
The idea of an integrated sound map for English and other languages:
While English shows irregularities, understanding IPA and phoneme inventories supports cross-language literacy analysis and multilingual reading development.
Key Concepts and Takeaways
Core distinction: reading makes word boundaries explicit; speech does not, which complicates real-time segmentation in listening.
Orthography vs phonology are distinct yet interlinked systems; reading requires mapping between the two, with English showing notable irregularities.
Phonological awareness is foundational for literacy; explicit teaching of phonemes, graphemes, and spelling patterns supports decoding and encoding.
Reading research often uses single-word tasks (lexical decisions, naming) and text-based tasks (eye-tracking, priming) to isolate subprocesses; however, real-world reading involves larger texts and integrative comprehension.
Five major research methods provide converging evidence on how reading unfolds: lexical decision, naming, eye-tracking, priming, and neuroimaging.
Phonology influences reading at all ages; even silent reading in adults engages phonological representations, sometimes influenced by accent and neighbor relationships.
Deaf readers still rely on phonological-like representations or alternative modalities during reading, underscoring the robustness of phonological processing in literacy.
Educational implications emphasize balanced literacy: decode-to-meaning integration, phonological awareness training, and strategies to develop fluent, meaning-rich reading.
Important caveat: much of the literature has a focus on English; cross-language reading research is essential to avoid biases and to inform multilingual literacy practices.
Notable Examples and Anecdotes from the Lecture
The cat → catapult example demonstrates how words can expand into larger lexical items by attaching different morphemes and meanings.
The classic jumbled-letter example illustrates word recognition relying on the first and last letters and overall word shape, though the attribution to Cambridge University is contested.
A limerick eye-tracking study showed how readers from different parts of England backtrack to verify rhymes, indicating engagement of phonology during silent reading across dialects.
Tongue twisters in silent reading reveal phonological processing even without aloud speech: readers showed increased fixations and processing difficulty.
A study on phonological neighbors showed that reading is influenced by neighbors that sound similar; when a neighbor is a real word and phonologically similar, processing can slow due to competition; when the neighbor is not a real word, processing can be smoother.
A classic example of phonological priming: readers process words more quickly when primes share phonology, implying fast, automatic phonological activation during reading.
Connections to Previous Lectures and Real-World Relevance
Connects to broader language processing topics: how people understand sentences, lexical access, and semantic integration.
Real-world relevance for education: highlights why phonological awareness training matters in early schooling and why reading to learn requires strong decoding and comprehension skills.
Practical implications for multilingual education: cross-language orthography-phonology mappings influence how quickly children learn to read in different languages; supports teaching approaches tailored to orthographic transparency.
Ethical and methodological considerations: overreliance on English-centric studies may bias understanding; cross-language research is necessary for inclusive literacy education.
Equations, Formulas, and Numerical References (LaTeX)
Phoneme inventory in NZ English:
Total sounds:
Consonants: ; Vowels:
Alphabet and spelling patterns:
Alphabet letters:
Common spelling patterns: ; Total spelling patterns:
Temporal markers in ERP components:
N400 peak: after target word onset
P600 peak: after target word onset
Reading development timeframes:
Transition to reading-to-learn around age:
Phonology in eye-tracking studies (example timings):
Priming effects and fixation offsets often observed within a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus onset; exact timings vary by task, but key ERP and eye-tracking markers align with the ERP timings above.
Final Thoughts
Reading is a complex, multi-component system that draws on orthography, phonology, semantics, and syntax to build meaning.
While reading and speaking share foundations, the modality-specific cues (punctuation vs prosody, word boundaries, coarticulation) create distinct processing demands.
Ongoing research continually reveals the depth of phonology’s involvement in reading, from early decoding to silent, adult comprehension, including implications for education, multilingualism, and cognitive science.
The field benefits from cross-language studies to avoid English-centric bias and to better understand universal versus language-specific reading processes.