Incidental detection of rhyming in silent reading

In order to study the availability of phonological properties of a text being processed, an incidental detection of rhyming task was used. Subjects were presented • with what appeared to be two prose sentences, one of which contained six rhyming words. In Experiment 1, the subjects were asked to listen, read orally, or read silently. The rhymes were either graphemically similar or not, and the sentences were either presented in context or not. After the presentation, the subjects were questioned about whether they had noticed the rhyming. The overall percentage of subjects who noticed rhymes ranged from 6% at the worst condition to 87% at the best condition. Noticing rhymes was much poorer in silent reading. It was strongly affected by the presence of context and graphemical similarity, and this was true in all modes of presentation to the same degree. In Experiment 2, the possibility of a memory artefact was ruled out. A possible interpretation of the results is that phonological information is not highly critical for comprehending a text. The effect of graphemical similarity under auditory presentation indicates the important role of orthography in processing linguistic input of any source.