External Generallzability of Inquiry Involving Artificial Orthography

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted to examine the validity of artificial orthography as a research device. Although widely cited studies have used several artificial orthographies to investigate basic reading processes, this study seems to indicate that artificial orthographies are not comparable to each other or to the English alphabet. Two experiments used paired associate tasks with kindergarten, first-grade, and college students; one experiment used a transfer task with first-grade students; one experiment used a visual discrimination task with kindergarten students. Varying results were obtained with the orthographies as a function of (a) the type of task the student was required to perform, (b) the age of the student, (c) the size of the stimuli, and (d) the number of response distractors presented. The results indicate that the use of artificial orthography is not valid when findings are generalized from artificial orthographies to the English alphabet and from various aged individuals to the way young children learn actual letters and words in English.

BACS: The Brussels Artificial Character Sets for studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience

“…Thus, the character sets used vary overall and are more or less similar to the native script of participant. Furthermore, the characters used in previous studies are most of the time not available, so that replications are difficult and comparisons among studies are questionable (e.g., Knafle & Legenza, 1978). In the following, we highlight the characteristics that need to be considered when devising and using artificial characters.…”

“…This can be an issue because characters more complex than those of the native script could alter processing relative to simpler symbols. Knafle and Legenza (1978) showed for example that the positive influence of letter name knowledge on reading acquisition in English (see Levin, Shatil-Carmon, & Asif-Rave, 2006) was present in artificial scripts only when the characters were of similar complexity to the letters of the Latin alphabet. To meet the complexity and familiarity constraints, devising new characters (based on the native system) thus appears as a good alternative.…”

“…The aim was no more to simulate reading acquisition per se (which is actually hardly possible, see Knafle & Legenza, 1978, for a discussion), but rather to examine the developmental course of letter string processing (e.g., acquisition of visual expertise in reading: ; development of high quality lexical representations: Hart & Perfetti, 2008; letter position coding: García-Orza, Perea, & Muñoz, 2010) or to finely investigate processes that occur during letter/word processing (e.g., effects of orthographic or graphotactic regularities: Samara & Caravolas, 2014;Singer, 1980;Mason & Katz, 1976;print-tosound consistency effects: Taylor, Plunkett, & Nation, 2011; influence of first language characteristics on the acquisition of a second language: Ehrich & Meuter, 2009;Meuter & Ehrich, 2012; influence of handwriting knowledge on letter recognition: Longcamp, Boucard, Gilhodes, & Velay, 2006). For such studies, the relevance of using unknown or artificial characters lies in the possibility of investigating issues in a Bpure^way, in the sense that the degree of familiarity with the script is fully controlled and that it is easier to avoid confounds that are inevitable with natural stimuli.…”