Investigating the Roles of Phonology and Orthography in Visual Word Recognition

The nature of visual word recognition, the process of identifying written words, involves a relatively unknown importance of the letters (orthography) vs. the sounds that those letters represent (phonology). Anadromes are a pair of words that have either the same phonemes or letters in reverse order, and they offer a unique way to study the nature of visual word recognition by allowing the transpositions of letters and sounds and measuring the resulting activation trends. The relative influences of phonology and orthography in visual recognition can be studied by using three types of anadromes: orthographic (flow, wolf), phonological (tube, boot), and both orthographic and phonological (pot, tube). In an eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), we assessed which types of anadromes were activated by highly skilled readers. A number of t-tests determined that phonological anadromes received significant activation, both orthographic and phonological anadromes were not significantly activated though they were trending in the right direction, and orthographic anadromes were not significantly activated. The results suggest that phonology serves a significant role in the process of visual word recognition and overlapping orthography may actually hinder activation, although there were a variety of limitations.