ARTICULATORY LOOP AND CHILDRENS READING

Three experiments investigated whether the articulatory loop is used as a temporary phonological store in 7- to 9-year-old children's reading. Performance of various reading tasks was examined with and without articulatory suppression, an interference procedure which disrupts the articulatory loop. Experiment 1 used a lexical decision task involving presentations of words, pseudohomophones (e.g. HUNNIE), and non-homophonic non-words. Pseudohomophones led to longer response times and more errors than non-homophonic non-words, but this effect was unaltered by articulatory suppression. Overall, suppression led to better performance, producing faster response times with no increase in errors. In Expt 2, suppression impaired performance on a rhyme-judgement task. In Expt 3, children performed a lexical decision task in which letter strings were presented in either a normal format or in two parts arranged one above the other so as to enforce prelexical blending. Suppression led to faster response times and had no effect on errors, regardless of the need to combine the word segments. These results suggest that for beginning readers, as with fluent readers, the articulatory loop is used for rhyme judgements but a separate kind of phonological coding is used in making lexical decisions.