Rowed to recovery: The use of phonological and orthographic information inreading Chinese and English

To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographi c and phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effect s of spelling errors on reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993). Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in their native language that contained occasional spelling errors. Results showed that under some circum stances very early phonological activation can be identified in English, bu t no evidence for early phonology was found in Chinese. In both languages, homophone errors showed a benefit in measures of later processing, suggesti ng that phonology helps readers recover from the disruptive effects of erro rs. These results suggest that skilled readers take advantage of the specia l features of particular orthographies but that these orthographic effects may be most pronounced in the early stages of lexical access.