Suppressing Inner Speech in ESL Reading: Implications for Developmental Changes in Second Language Word Recognition Processes

Abstract

The effect of articulatory suppression on second language (L2) visual sentence comprehension and its relation to L2 reading proficiency and lower level processing efficiency were investigated in a series of experiments using 64 college‐level Japanese English as a second language learners as participants. The results supported the hypothesis that increased reading proficiency requires developmental changes in lower level skills; namely a greater degree of L2 reading proficiency requires greater orthographic processing skills. This is especially pronounced for the groups comprising proficient and less proficient readers. With regard to proficient readers, there were significant intercorrelations among sentence processing performance under suppression, reading comprehension score, and orthographic skills; however, none of these relationships were significant with less proficient readers. In contrast, phonological processing continued to make a significant contribution with proficient readers under suppression. This confounding outcome implies that a simple choice between phonological and direct‐visual coding strategies does not fully explain the L2 reading process under articulatory suppression.