The role of speech production in phonological decoding during visual word recognition: evidence from phonotactic repair

The phonological decoding of non-native letter sequences during visual word recognition has been shown to be influenced by phonotactic constraints of the reader’s native language [Hallé, P. A., Dominguez, A., Cuetos, F., & Segui, J. (2008). Phonological mediation in visual masked priming: Evidence from phonotactic repair. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 34(1), 177–192]. We investigate the mechanisms underlying such phonotactic repair. We focus on a phonotactic constraint in French, according to which words cannot begin with /tl/. Native speakers of French are known to perceive word-initial /tl/ as /kl/. Using a visual priming paradigm, we show that the same phonotactic repair also occurs when the cluster “tl” is presented visually, but, crucially, only when participants’ speech production system is available; under articulatory suppression the repair fails to occur. Together, these results show that the speech production system is actively involved in phonological decoding during reading. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 22 April 2015 Accepted 22 September 2015