For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors.

几十年来，研究人员一直在争论读者是否能从将视觉文字形式翻译成语音代码中受益。这场争论的焦点是在中心凹视觉中感知单词时的最早的处理时刻（即语音预览益处）。最近的一项荟萃​​分析（Vasilev 等人，2019）得出的结论是，语音预览的好处可能很小且不可靠，但他们没有考虑到纳入研究中不同的潜在重要刺激水平或参与者水平因素。因此，我们进行了两项强有力的实验，系统地研究了句子约束、预习词汇和参与者语言技能对语音预习效益效果的影响。我们发现，高约束句子与低约束句子的语音预览优势更大，单词的语音预览优势大于伪单词，拼写能力较好的句子的语音预览优势更大。我们得出的结论是，语音代码确实有助于阅读过程中的早期单词识别，但语音预习的益处大小取决于主题和刺激水平因素。