Tongue-twister effects in the silent reading of hearing and deaf college students

To investigate whether deaf readers use phonological information during sentence comprehension, deaf and hearing college students performed a semantic acceptability task on tongue-twister and control sentences. Indicative of phonological coding, subjects' responses were influenced by the phonetic content of the sentences they were reading and by the phonetic content of a concurrent memory load task. That is, the subjects in both groups made more errors in their acceptability judgments when reading tongue-twister than when reading control sentences. In addition, subjects in both groups made more errors when the tongue-twister sentences and concurrent memory load numbers were phonetically similar than when they were phonetically dissimilar. These results support theories that assign phonological processes an important role in reading. © 1991.