The time course of phonological and orthographic processing of acronyms in reading: evidence from eye movements.

The present experiment presented acronyms preceded by either a or an in a sentence. The key stimuli were acronyms that begin with a consonant such as F, whose letter name begins with a vowel sound, or with the vowel U, whose letter name begins with a consonant sound. The durations of first fixations were influenced solely by phonology: For example, a FBI caused as much disruption (relative to an FBI) as did an CIA (relative to a CIA). Somewhat later processing (most notably go-past time and total time) was influenced by orthography as well, as combinations such as an FBI had longer processing times than did combinations such as a CIA. Although the initial coding of visual stimuli must proceed from an orthographic code to a phonological one, these data indicate that the phonological representation of the acronym is the primary initial code that makes contact with the article that precedes it and suggest that the initial contact with the sentence context is phonological.