Orthographic learning in adults through overt and covert reading

Fluent reading and writing rely on well-developed orthographic representations stored in memory. According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218), children acquire orthographic representations through phonological decoding. However, it is not clear to what extent phonological decoding facilitates orthographic learning in adult readers. Across two experiments, we manipulated access to phonology during overt (aloud) and covert (silent) reading of monosyllabic and multisyllabic pseudowords by English-speaking undergraduate students. Additionally, Experiment 2 tested whether concurrent articulation during covert reading leads to poorer learning due to the suppression of subvocalization. The amount of incidental orthographic learning through reading exposure was measured a week later with a choice task, a spelling task, and a naming task. Overt reading, which leveraged phonological decoding, led to better recognition and recall of pseudowords compared to when readers read silently. Unlike in previous reports of child orthographic learning, concurrent articulation during covert reading did not reduce learning outcomes in adults, suggesting that adult readers may rely upon other processing strategies during covert reading, e.g., direct orthographic processing or lexicalized phonological decoding. This is consistent with claims that with increasing orthographic knowledge reading mechanisms shift from being more phonologically-based to more visually-based.