Why is nonword reading so variable in adult skilled readers?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Cognitive Disorders, Psychiatry and Psychology, Computational Science
- Keywords
- nonword reading, grapheme, phonological dyslexia, computational modeling
- Copyright
- © 2018 Coltheart et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Why is nonword reading so variable in adult skilled readers? PeerJ Preprints 6:e26647v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26647v1
Abstract
When the task is reading nonwords aloud, skilled adult readers are very variable in the responses they produce: a nonword can evoke as many as 24 different responses in a group of such readers. Why is nonword reading so variable? We analysed a large database of reading responses to nonwords, and identified two factors responsible for this variability. The first factor is variability in graphemic parsing (the parsing of a letter string into its constituent graphemes): the same nonword can be graphemically parsed in different ways by different readers. The second factor is phoneme assignment: even when all subjects produce the same graphemic parsing of a nonword, they vary in what phonemes they assign to the resulting set of graphemes. We consider the implications of these results for the computational modelling of reading, for the assessment of impairments of nonword reading, and for the study of reading aloud in other alphabetically-written languages and in nonalphabetic writing systems.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.