Roles of articulatory movements and speech feedback in Japanese text comprehension during oral reading

Abstract

When reading orally, we produce the auditory information of the text through articulatory movements. We investigated the roles of articulatory movements and speech feedback in Japanese text comprehension. Previous studies of Japanese sentence comprehension showed that articulatory movements provide a function to retain word order information and that speech feedback facilitates complementary information processing. We predicted an effect of articulatory movements on verbatim memory and a limited influence of speech feedback on passage comprehension. Twenty-four undergraduates were asked to read 12 Japanese passages with or without articulatory movements and speech feedback. They then performed two types of tasks: verbatim memory and passage comprehension. The results showed that verbatim memory task performance improved with articulatory movements, whereas speech feedback had little effect on either task performance. We concluded that articulatory movements support the memory process and that speech feedback has little contribution to text memory and comprehension among adult readers.