What eye fixations tell us about phonological recoding during reading.

Evidence for phonological recoding during reading has depended on paradigms requiring readers to make some response in addition to reading (e.g., proofreading, concurrent speaking). Our subjects simply read text for comprehension, and their eye movements were monitored for spontaneous disruptions when encountering homophonic errors (e.g., He wore blew jeans.) versus nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He wore blow jeans.). Eye fixation behaviour revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty when encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one; however homophony facilitated the recovery process, at least for homophones that shared the same length as their context correct mates (e.g., blew/blue but not war/wore). The results support a theory of lexical access in which phonological sources of activation and influence are delayed relative to orthographic sources, rather than a theory in which phonological codes predominate.