Recoding of Printed Words to Internal Speech: Does Recoding Come Before Lexical Access?

This chapter is concerned with the question of whether people in the process of analyzing visually presented words for meaning translate them mentally to some form of internal speech. We use ''internal speech'' to refer to the general class of speechlike mental representations that have been proposed and ''speech recoding" to refer to the various mechanisms proposed for translating to internal speech. We do this because we do not intend to review evidence that bears on the decision between phonetic, phonemic, articulatory, acoustic, or other models of recoding and mental representation. Our concern is in deciding whether or not speech recoding takes place in reading, and the question of the form speech recoding takes seems a secondary issue.