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There is a Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension

Date

2016-05-06

Authors

Klein, Raymond
Saint-Aubin, Jean
Babineau, Mireille
Christie, John
Gow, David

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

SAGE

Abstract

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This phenomenon, called the missing-letter effect, has been considered a window on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the visual processing of written language. In the present study, one group of participants read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter and another group listened to the narration of the same two texts while listening for the corresponding target letter's phoneme. The ubiquitous missing-letter effect was replicated and extended to a "missing-phoneme effect". Item-based correlations between the letter and the phoneme detection tasks were high leading us to conclude that both procedures reflect cognitive processes that reading and listening have in common which are rooted in psycholinguistically driven allocation of attention.

Description

Keywords

attention, audio-processing, letter search, psycholinguistic processing, reading

Citation

Saint-Aubin, J., Klein, R. M., Babineau, M., Christie, J., & Gow, D. W. (2016). The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension. Psychological science, doi:10.1177/0956797616645096