The case of the neglected alphasyllabary: Orthographic processing in Devanagari

Abstract

We applaud Ram Frost for highlighting the need for multicultural perspectives while developing universal models of visual word recognition. We second Frost's proposal that factors like lexical morphology should be incorporated besides purely orthographic features in modeling word recognition. In support, we provide fresh evidence from Hindi (written in Devanagari), an example of hitherto under-represented alphasyllabic orthographies, in which flexible encoding of aksara (character) position is constrained by the morphological structure of words.

Alphabetism and the science of reading: from the perspective of the akshara languages

“…Some of these include non-linear symbol arrangements (Vaid and Gupta, 2002; Kandhadai and Sproat, 2010; Winskel and Perea, 2014), unmarked and inherent symbol features (Nag, 2007; Bhide et al, 2014), visually complex symbol sets (Nag et al, 2014) and word types differing because of symbol characteristics (Nag, 2014; Wijayathilake and Parrila, 2014) or morpho-orthographic characteristics (Rao et al, 2012). A step before the hunt for higher-order universals would be to bring focus in reading science on these kinds of particularities.…”

Transposition Effects in an Aksharic Writing System: The Case of Hindi

“…The investigators' conclusion was that akshars show TEs, and based on this finding they proposed "the syllabic CV akṣ ara as the probable input unit for orthographic encoding in Hindi/Devanagari, similarly to syllabic-moraic Kana in Japanese" (Rao et al 2012, p. 303). However, the results of Rao et al (2012) are not interpretable in the context of other transposition priming studies because their control or replaced condition prime was a word whereas their transposed prime was a nonword. Also, some of their primes had minimal diacritics when the target had no diacritics, and sometimes the first and last non-transposed letters in the prime were not the same as in the target.…”

“…There is one study of TEs in Hindi with Hindi readers (Rao et al, 2012). It used the masked transposition priming paradigm with RT measures, and studied the effect of transposing two medial ‹C› letters in a ‹Cə*C*Cə*C› sequence, for example, ‹मतलब› (/mət̪ .ləb/.…”

A Generative Model of a Pronunciation Lexicon for Hindi

“…Hankul for Korean) [3]. Hindi writing encapsulates in it linguistic awareness of its speakers at multiple levels-phonetic, phonological [4,6,11] and morphological [12,13] and lend it the character of a mix of surface and deep orthographic systems, rather than a simple surface orthographic system (see [14], for a discussion of the types of orthographic systems) The main features of an alpha-syllabic script are the following: (5) • The consonant letter has an inherent vowel, which is normally the mid central vowel /@/ or its lower counterpart /5/.…”