ABSTRACT
Children who are skilled readers rely more on phonological coding and prefer it to nonphonological coding. This chapter discusses the characteristics of phonological and non-phonological codes and their potential uses in word recognition in reading. An excellent contrast to English, with its complex, deep orthographic relation to the surface phonetics of speech, is Serbo-Croatian, whose shallow orthography closely mirrors the surface phonetics. However, the fact that graphemic invariance is used to represent morphophonemes gives weight to the argument that readers will use this graphemic invariance for a visual code to access the item in a visually based lexicon instead of a speech lexicon. This presumes that there is a good deal of linguistic structure to such a visual lexicon; morphemes that are parts of words must be represented as well as whole words. Subjects in a lexical decision task were presented with stimuli that were ostensibly printed only in the Roman alphabet.
