Phonemic effects in reading comprehension and text memory

Two experiments investigated the role of phonemic information in adult reading comprehension and replicated the visual tongue‐twister effect in a new paradigm–a modified probe memory task. College students took longer to read sentences that repeated word initial consonants (tongue‐twisters) than matched control sentences. Equally important, subjects also took longer to respond to probe words from tongue‐twisters. Slower response times in both the sentence reading task and the probe memory task indicate that the tongue‐twister effect is indeed phonemic in nature and that phonemic information is used in memory during comprehension.