This research explored the issue of whether beginning readers proceed from print directly to meaning, as suggested by Barron and Baron , or whether it is necessary for them to use phonological information in order to obtain access to the meaning of printed words. Children between the ages of 7 and 12 were asked to make semantic interpretations from printed words. If beginning readers make use of an intermediate phonemic code in accessing the lexicon, speech sounds will affect decision times. For this reason, speech sounds were presented shortly before a visual word display. The results show that similarity between sound and the pronuciation of the word is facilitative for beginning readers (both for familiar and unfamiliar orthographies and independent of orthographic complexity) but has no effect for more fluent readers. 5 experiments to explore this phenomenon were carried out, and from the results it was concluded that at least at low levels of reading skill intermediate phonemic codes are used in lexical access.
