Phonetic Recoding of Phonologically Ambiguous Printed Words

Speech detection and matching simultaneously presented printed and spoken words were used to examine phonologic and phonetic processing of Hebrew heterophonic homographs. Subjects detected a correspondence between an ambiguous letter string and the amplitude envelopes of both dominant and subordinate phonological alternatives. Similar effects were obtained when the homographs were phonologically disambiguated by adding vowel marks. The matching of the unpointed printed forms of heterophonic homographs to the dominant and subordinate spoken alternatives presented auditorily was as fast as matching the pointed unambiguous forms to the respective spoken words. This outcome was not obtained when print and speech were not presented simultaneously. These results suggest that printed heterophonic homographs activate the two spoken alternatives they represent and provide further confirmation for fast phonetic recoding in reading.