Authors:

Strain, E., Patterson, K. & Seidenberg, M.S.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1995

CBU number:

3274

Abstract:

Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, reading aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality, but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Subjects were slower and more error-prone to name exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., scarce) than either abstract regular words (e.g., scribe) or imageable exception words (e.g., soot). It is proposed that semantic representations of words have the largest impact on translating orthography to phonology when this translation process is slow or noisy (i.e., for low-frequency exceptions), and that words with rich semantic representations (i.e. high-imageability words) are most likely to benefit from this interaction.