Orthographic and Phonological Form Interference During Silent Reading

This study reports 2 eye tracking experiments investigating form interference during sentence -level silent reading. The items involved reduced and unreduced relative clauses (RCs) with words that were orthographically and phonologically similar (injection-injection: O+P+, Experiment 1) as well as with words that were orthographically similar, but phonologically dissimilar (laughter-daughter; O+P-, Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed syntactic processing disruptions for reduced RCs. Processing difficulty was also observed at the form -related word in both experiments under first pass and second pass reading measures. 'These form-interference effects did not interact with structural processing difficulty under first-pass measures in either experiment. Under second-pass time, there were larger processing disruptions for reduced RCs in 0+P+ sentences relative to their controls. This was not the case, however, for 0+P sentences. These results suggest 2 components to form -interference effects during silent reading: (a) an early, low-level component that is driven in largo part by visual form overlap and (b) a component that relates to late stages of interpretation and that is associated more closely with phonological 'form overlap.