ABSTRACT
There is a great deal of evidence which suggests that readers determine the phonological representation of a word early during visual word recognition (Pollatsek, Lesch, Morris, & Rayner, 1992), and that a word’s phonological code is maintained in working memory during sentence reading (Folk & Morris, 1995). However it is unclear whether the phonological code used for a word’s identification is also the code used in working memory storage. Recently Hnhoff, Connine, Eiter, Radach, & Heller (in press) proposed that the phonological code maintained in working memory includes the representation of speech-like properties. If the early-activated phonological code is similar to the code maintained in working memory, and therefore possesses qualities comparable to the phonological code of the spoken word, then providing readers with a spoken word, which is essentially the phonological code of the visual word, should benefit readers by providing a head start for visual word identification.
