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Alphabetic orthographies vary in the (in)consistency of the relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling, in contrast to opaque orthographies such as English, where spelling-sound correspondences are often inconsistent. The pronunciation of English vowel letters is in particular very ambiguous. In this paper, we provide a cross-linguistic investigation of orthographic transparency at the wordinitial letter-phoneme level, resulting in ranked metrics for the seven languages investigated: Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese, expressed as entropy values. We focus on the contributions of vowels and consonants towards the overall orthographic transparency and provide evidence that deviations from consistent word-initial 1:1 mappings between letters and phonemes influence reaction times in naming tasks. Implications for theories of visual word recognition and speech production will be discussed.

Alphabetic orthographies show more or less ambiguous relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling and vice versa. Opaque orthographies, like English, often display unpredictable spelling–sound correspondences. In this paper we present a computational analysis of word-initial bi-directional spelling–sound correspondences for Dutch, English, French, German, and Hungarian, stated in entropy values for various grain sizes. This allows us to position the five languages on the continuum from opaque to transparent orthographies, both in spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling directions. The analysis is based on metrics derived from information theory, and therefore independent of any specific theory of visual word recognition as well as of any specific theoretical approach of orthography.

In the study of reading, there is a debate about whether letters or graphemes are the primary units of perception. A promising data basis for empirically contributing to this debate can be gained from measuring the perception of single vowel letters compared to vowel digraphs. We used letter detection with masked pseudoword primes on pseudoword targets among skilled native readers in order to test for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects during reading in deep (English) and shallow (Dutch) orthographies. Selecting these two languages, which are similar in terms of syllabic structure, allowed us to use exactly the same pseudoword stimuli. Results indicate that whereas the Dutch readers show letter effects at short prime durations and digraph effects at longer prime durations, the English readers show only letter effects. These findings are inconsistent with a strong version of the claim that graphemes are perceptual in nature, but consistent with models of reading acquisition and skilled reading that predict that, although letter effects always precede grapheme effects, grapheme activation proceeds faster in relatively shallow orthographies than in relatively deep ones.

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