Phonological Recoding in the First and Second Language Reading of Skilled Bilinguals *

This study investigated phonological recoding in reading by highly skilled English and French bilinguals. Bilinguals with approximately equal reading rates in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages and bilinguals with significantly slower rates in L2 than in L1 participated in lexical decision and sentence verification tasks in each language with stimuli designed to assess sensitivity to the phonological properties of words. The results suggested that: (1) in general, slow L2 readers were not more dependent upon phonological recoding than were fast L2 readers; (2) for slow readers, L2 presented a heavier processing load in working memory than it did for fast readers; and (3) there exist different phonological effects specific to English and French.