Investigating the importance of the least supported phoneme on visual word naming.

The least supported phoneme refers to the phoneme position within a word with which the fewest phonological neighbors overlap. Recently, it has been argued that the number of neighbors coinciding with the least supported phoneme is a critical determinant of pronunciation latencies. The current research tested this claim by comparing naming latencies to words that differed in terms of the number of neighbors overlapping with their least supported phoneme. The results revealed that words where many neighbors overlapped were named more rapidly than those where few neighbors overlapped. These results are explained using the dual-route cascaded model of reading aloud. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.