Phonological codes in advanced second language reading of English

In first language reading, there is considerable evidence that representations of phonological information for words (known as phonological codes) contribute significantly to word recognition and subsequent processing. In second language reading, there has been scant research on the role of phonological codes and there have been suggestions that they play a minimal role. This study attempts to investigate whether phonological codes contribute to second language reading and if so, whether there are implications of the second language reader's non-native phonological system. Subjects were native Thai, advanced second language readers of English. A comparison group of native English readers was also included. In the first task, subjects judged whether stimuli were correct exemplars of a category (e.g., an animal). The native Thai subjects made more errors to homophone foils (e.g., bare) in comparison to yoked orthographic control foils (e.g., belt) demonstrating that phonological codes contribute to the activation of semantic codes in word comprehension. In the second task, subjects judged whether sentences were sensible. The native Thai subjects made more errors to anomalous sentences containing homophone foils (e.g., He guest who she was.) than to sentences containing yoked orthographic control foils (e.g., He gushed who she was.) demonstrating that phonological codes contribute to sentence comprehension.; Next, the study investigated whether phonological codes in second language reading may contain neutralizations of English phonemic distinctions. The first task included interlanguage (IL) homophone foils (e.g., code) and IL pseudohomophone foils (e.g., skird) which may sound like correct exemplars of the category (e.g., clothing) following the application of a common native Thai interlanguage devoicing rule for final stop consonants in English. The native Thai subjects made more errors to IL homophones in comparison to yoked orthographic control foils demonstrating that phonemic neutralizations affect word comprehension processes. In the second task, errors to sentences containing IL homophones (e.g., She hid me on my nose.) were elevated but not significantly different from orthographic controls after adjusting for spelling knowledge.; Finally, the study investigated whether phonemic neutralizations may result in increased processing times in word, sentence and passage reading. Response times to IL homophone category exemplars were higher than to controls. Reading times to a passage laden with IL homophones were higher than to a control passage.