A influência da natureza fonética do fonema inicial da palavra na medida de tempo de reação em tarefas de leitura em voz alta

Abstract

Experiments of reading aloud isolated words, in which the reactiontime (RT) is measured based on the time between the appearanceof the stimulus on the computer screen and the beginning of theemission of its pronunciation by the subject, were used test thehypothesis that the phonetic nature of the initial phonemes of thewords affects the measurement of the RT, since for words beginningwith stop consonants, for example, the sound itself contains an average silence lasting 100ms. If the phonetic nature of the firstsound influences the measurement of the RT, this means that intasks of reading aloud, this phenomenon should be described andcontrolled. Thus, a list of 58 words varying in the phonetic natureof their first sound – vowel, stop (voiced and unvoiced), fricative(voiced and unvoiced), nasal and lateral – were presented tochildren from 1st to 4th grades and to adult readers, with their reactiontimes recorded. The first results do not confirm the hypothesis thatthe silence of the stop sound is affecting the RT, since no significantdifference was found between the average RT between the stopsand fricatives. The shortest RTs were recorded for the nasalconsonants and the vowels (o, a) for the adult group and for allthe grades (excepting the vowel a for the first grade). The longestRTs were recorded for the fricative sound R (except in the thirdgrade), and u (except in the adult group). The behavior of thesound u was distinctly curious, not following the pattern of theother vowels in the children’s reading.