Costs and Benefits of Orthographic Inconsistency in Reading: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Abstract

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences.

The ability to learn new written words is modulated by language orthographic consistency

“…In inconsistent orthographies, the presence of irregular words may encourage children to rely on larger processing units which are more phonologically consistent and, ultimately, on stored representations [36][37][38][39][40]. Consistent results have been reported in studies examining reading errors [41][42][43][44][45] and the effects of psycholinguistic variables ( [41,46], see also [47,48] for an English-Italian comparison on the same samples examined in the present study). In this case, you may predict the opposite: that lexical learning will be easier in orthographically opaque languages which practice processing of larger orthographic units.…”

The Role of the Left Anterior Temporal Lobe for Unpredictable and Complex Mappings in Word Reading

“…For instance, a higher error rate has been observed in the reading of low-frequency Italian words with complex OPM as compared to words with simple OPM (Burani et al, 2006). Similarly, complex OPM affect reading performance in Dutch (Bosman et al, 2006) as well as reading acquisition in English and Italian (Marinelli et al, 2016). In French, complex mappings have been shown to affect spelling in brain damaged patients, who showed a specific deficit in the writing of stimuli with complex mappings (Auclair-Ouellet et al, 2013).…”

Lexical and sublexical effects on visual word recognition in Greek: comparing human behavior to the dual route cascaded model

“…These findings are in line with the orthographic depth hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992) as they indicate that in conditions of high transparency, and, therefore, highly reliable GPC rules, readers may utilize sublexical representations to a high degree. In contrast, in less transparent languages, like English, syllables might not be utilized as much (Ziegler et al, 1997; related arguments regarding processing unit size have been made also on the basis of length effects, e.g., for Italian, Marinelli, et al, 2016, andeye movement patterns, e.g., for German, Rau et al, 2016, among others). Furthermore, our results show that phonologically defined syllables may hold a unique status among sublexical representations.…”