Lexical decision in a phonologically shallow orthography

Abstract

The Serbo-Croatian language is written in two alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic. Both orthographies transcribe the sounds of the language in a regular and straightforward fashion and may, therefore, be referred to as phonologically shallow in contrast to English orthography, which is phonologically deep. Most of the alphabet characters are unique to one alphabet or the other. There are, however, a number of shared characters, some of which receive the same reading and some of which receive a different reading, in the two alphabets. It is possible, therefore, to construct a variety of types of letter strings. Some of these can be read in only one way and can be either a word or nonsense. Other letter strings can be pronounced one way if read as Roman and in a distinctively different way if read as Cyrillic and can be words in both alphabets-but different words; or they can be nonsense in both alphabets or nonsense in one alphabet and a word in the other. In a lexical decision task conducted with bialphabetical readers, it was shown that words that can be read in two different ways are accepted more slowly and with greater error than words that can be read only one way. It was concluded that for the phonologically shallow writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, lexical decision proceeds with reference to the phonology.A case can be made for distinguishing among alphabetic writing systems in terms of the derivational complexity that relates the spelling to the underlying phonological form (Liberman, Liberman, Mattingly, & Shankweiler, in press). English orthography is the notorious example of a "phonologically deep" writing system; but it is a truly phonographic orthography in spite of its depth because each spelled English word contains strong hints as to its pronunciation. Nevertheless, the opaqueness of the link between English script and phonology is seen by many as a barrier to phonological involvement in fluent reading (Goodman, 1973;Kolers, 1970; Smith, 1971). The argument runs as follows: Given the difficulty of deriving the phonology , readers of English would be considerably better off if they had the option of bypassing the phonology and of relating to their alphabetic orthography much in the same way that the readers of Chinese, say, are thought to relate to their logographic orthography, that is, of proceeding directly from script to meaning. The latter point of view receives some measure of support from analyses that purportedly reveal a closer fit of English

Unintentional word reading via the phonological route: The Stroop effect with cross-script homophones.

“…Because our participants were native speakers of Hebrew, it should be clear that the Stroop effect for English-written and cross-script homophones should have been relatively small (see Magiste, 1984;Tzelgov, Henik, & Leiser, 1990). Lukatela, Popadic, Ognenovic, and Turvey (1981) distinguished between alphabets having deep or shallow orthographies. In the latter, the relation between graphemes and phonemes is simple and straightforward; thus, words are spelled the way they sound.…”

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

“…The choice of route may, in turn, be influenced by the relative grapheme-to-phoneme transparency (or shallowness) of a writing system, as proposed in the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis or ODH (Frost, Katz, & Bentin 1987). Lukatela, Popadić, Ognjenović, and Turvey (1980) showed that readers of SerboCroatian (written in Roman and Cyrillic, with both orthographies being highly transparent) were slower at making lexical decisions to words comprised of phonologically ambiguous letters. These words have one rendition if construed as being written in Roman script and another when taken for Cyrillic; for example, POTOP in Roman means deluge, whereas in Cyrillic, it is pronounced /rotor/, meaning rotor.…”

Semantic Effects in Word Naming: Evidence from English and Japanese Kanji

“…Kanji and English differ in terms of their "orthographic depth", which is roughly the degree to which the pronunciation of a word can be derived from the pronunciation of its parts. Thus, Serbo-Croatian and Italian are shallow, whereas English, which is more irregular, is deeper (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987;Lukatela, Popadic, Ognjenovic, & Turvey, 1980). Zorzi et al (1998b) predicted that readers differentially weight assembled phonology (i.e., the pronunciation derived from a direct spelling-sound mapping) and retrieved phonology (i.e., the pronunciation derived from lexical access) in a way that reflects the relative transparency of the mapping between spelling and sound in a specific language.…”