THE FUNCTIONS OF PHONOLOGY IN THE ACQUISITION OF READING - LEXICAL AND SENTENCE PROCESSING

It has been claimed (V. Coltheart, Laxon, Rickard, & Elton, 1988) that learners as well as skilled readers use phonology for multiple functi ons in reading-for-meaning tasks. This claim was examined using lexica l decision and sentence evaluation tasks. It was found in the first ex periment that the type of instruction learners had received determined whether there was prelexical use of phonology in responding to items out of sentence context. Type of instruction had no effect when the it ems were in context. In the second experiment, performances on a homop hone sentence evaluation task and a homophone semantic decision task, which excluded sentence processing, were examined. The results suggest that phonology served the function of access to lexical meanings in a ddition to any function in postlexical sentence processing. The obtain ed relationships between relative frequencies of the presented and unp resented homophone mates and item accuracy on these tasks were inconsi stent with exclusive use of ''direct access'' but consistent with acce ss of lexical meanings via phonology and application of a ''spelling-c heck'' procedure when multiple homophonic meanings are activated.