Orthography, Word Recognition, and Reading

Abstract

Orthographies differ from one another in terms of their scripts and in the specifics of the mapping from script to linguistic unit. Orthographic depth, the complexity of the mapping from script to language, modulates the ease with which an orthography is learned. Within an orthography, the consistency or regularity of a particular spelling pattern will temper the difficulty with which written words containing that pattern can be recognized. There is hope for a unified cross-orthography account of visual word recognition, although details of how non-alphabetic writing systems (e.g., syllabaries, morphosyllabaries, alphasyllabaries) may be fit into theoretical frameworks built on a foundation of empirical work on alphabetic reading are not entirely clear. There is a substantial gap in the literature with regard to reading and literacy in languages that make use of non-alphabetic writing systems. This euro-centric bias in reading research continues to limit advances in our understanding of the potential for literacy as a universal human capacity.Keywords: eye movements; computational models; lexical access; lexical representation; orthography; phonology; reading; writing systems PreliminariesThe nature of connection between oral and written language has been worried over by researchers for decades, perhaps as much as a century (Huey, 1908). Huey credits V. Egger with the notion that "to read is, in effect, to translate writing into speech (Huey, 1908, p. 123)." Some 60 years later, this basic idea was well on its way to becoming a lynch pin of our modern understanding of the relationship between speech perception, printed word recognition and language comprehension. Alvin Liberman, in Kavanagh (1968), framed the idea somewhat differently when he wrote that "reading is in some sense

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