Perceptual and Memory Processes in Reading

Abstract

Levy’s invited paper gives a good outline of earlier work on the role of phonological coding processes in reading and then presents evidence from phonological suppression experiments that phonological codes need to be generated in the course of reading if anything other than vague gist is to be remembered from the text. The experiments, combined with other recent work cited by Levy, provide a new level of understanding of the role of visual vs. verbal codes in reading. The traditional question has been, “Does one need to access verbal codes to apprehend the meaning of a word that is seen?” We can now attend to a more useful question: “Which comprehension processes depend upon verbal codes?”