| The goal of the present study was to delineate phonology's role in silent reading using event-related brain potential (ERP) techniques. Terminal endings of high cloze sentences were manipulated in 4 conditions. Terminal endings were: (1) words that were orthographically congruent (OC), phonologically congruent (PC), and semantically congruent (SC) to the high cloze probability ending (e.g. Larry writes with his left hand); (2) nonwords that were orthographically incongruent (0I), PC, and SC to the high cloze probability ending (e.g. The ship disappeared into the thick phog [fog].); (3) words that were OI, phonologically incongruent (PI), and semantically incongruent (SI) to the high cloze probability ending (e.g. The pizza was too hot to sing [eat].); and finally, (4) nonwords that were OI, PI, and SI to the high cloze probability ending (e.g., The teacher wrote the problem on the heet [board]). Participants were required to read sentences silently and decide whether or not they made sense. It was hypothesized that participants would rely solely on orthographic properties to access the meaning of terminal words, while engaging in a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion to access the meaning of terminal nonwords. Three distinct ERP components were observed. First, a late positive component (LPC) was elicited by SC endings reflecting the recognition of a congruent stimulus. Second, a N270 was elicited by OI endings. Third, a N400 was elicited by SI endings. The absence of a N400 to OI, yet PC nonwords, indicates that readers used a GPC strategy to make semantic judgments. However, neither the N270 nor the N400 differentiated OI words from OI nonwords, suggesting that readers adopted a GPC strategy for both words and nonwords. Plausible implications that results may have on current theories of phonology's role in reading are discussed. |
