Getting to the bottom of orthographic depth

Schmalz, Xenia; Marinus, Eva; Coltheart, Max; Castles, Anne

doi:10.3758/s13423-015-0835-2

Cited by 139 publications

(163 citation statements)

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“…Alphabetic writing systems differ on the complexity, consistency, and predictability with which the graphemes map into their corresponding phonemes (Schmalz, Marinus, Coltheart, & Castles, 2015). In Spanish, a shallow orthography, these relations are (mostly) univocal: the letter Bo^always converts to the sound /o/ and the phoneme /o/ is always written with the letter Bo.Ĥ owever, in deep orthographies like French, these mappings are far more complex and irregular (e.g., Rey & Schiller, 2005).…”

Section: Reading Subskills: Auditory Phonology and Visual Attention Spanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

Lallier

Carreiras

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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Reading acquisition is one of the most complex and demanding learning processes faced by children in their first years of schooling. If reading acquisition is challenging in one language, how is it when reading is acquired simultaneously in two languages? What is the impact of bilingualism on the development of literacy? We review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence from alphabetic writing systems suggesting that early bilingualism modulates reading development. Particularly, we show that cross-linguistic variations and cross-linguistic transfer affect bilingual reading strategies as well as their cognitive underpinnings. We stress the fact that the impact of bilingualism on literacy acquisition depends on the specific combination of languages learned and does not manifest itself similarly across bilingual populations. We argue that these differences can be explained by variations due to orthographic depth in the grain sizes used to perform reading and reading-related tasks. Overall, we propose novel hypotheses to shed light on the behavioral and neural variability observed in reading skills among bilinguals.Keywords Bilingualism . Reading development . Orthographic depth . Grain size Reading acquisition involves the recruitment and coordination of multiple cognitive and neural resources to build up fluent letter-to-sound mappings. However, the development of these complex mechanisms is not equal across languages. In alphabetic orthographies, the degree of difficulty affecting reading acquisition is modulated by factors linked to the complexity of letter-sound associations and to the size of the grain used in reading and reading related tasks. Although research has endeavored to improve our knowledge of reading acquisition across languages in monolingual settings, the number of behavioral (and neuroimaging) studies that look at reading development in bilinguals is rather scarce, making this population a clear outlier in this field of research. However, the rapid increase in the number of children acquiring reading in two languages simultaneously begs for more research on this question. The main goal of this article is to complement classic monolingual-centered research and take a step forward in proposing a novel framework on reading acquisition in bilinguals that will help to address unresolved questions on this topic: Namely, does bilingualism affect reading acquisition? And, if so, how does this influence manifest itself?In that aim, first, we present work that highlights the cognitive and neural bases of reading skills and reading subskills (auditory phonology and visual attention) in the context of monolingual and bilingual reading acquisition in alphabetic orthographies. Second, we review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence in monolinguals and bilinguals showing how orthographic-specific modulations shape the use of reading strategies and the size of the grain used in reading and reading-related tasks. Third, we propose the grain size accommodation hypothesis, which should contribute to predicti...

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Section: Reading Subskills: Auditory Phonology and Visual Attention Spanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

Lallier

Carreiras

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…A question that has attracted a great deal of attention is the way in which orthographic depth affects reading processes (Katz & Frost, 1992;Schmalz, Marinus, Coltheart, & Castles, 2015;Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Orthographic depth, broadly speaking, can be defined as the degree of ambiguity in the relationship between print and speech, which varies across languages.…”

Section: Theories Of Reading Across Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Generally speaking, potential confounds in psycholinguistic research can be associated either with language-level or participant-level factors. This issue is especially pertinent to cross-linguistic research, because languages tend to differ from each other on many aspects, and therefore it is often unclear to what language-level difference a cross-linguistic difference should be attributed (Schmalz et al, 2015). We discuss potential confounds that could provide alternative explanations for previous observations of differential reliance on bodies across languages in Section 1.2.…”

Section: What Counts As Evidence For the Psycholinguistic Grain Size mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A description of language-level differences beyond orthographic depth, and how these could affect specific cognitive mechanisms would generate a wealth of testable predictions. Moving beyond orthographic depth would help to create a framework of reading and reading acquisition that is not limited to alphabetic orthographies (Schmalz et al, 2015;Share, 2014).…”

Section: Theoretical Challenges For the Psycholingustic Grain Size Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

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German and English Bodies: No Evidence for Cross-Linguistic Differences in Preferred Orthographic Grain Size

Schmalz

Robidoux

Castles

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Previous studies have found that words and nonwords with many body neighbours (i.e., words with the same orthographic body, e.g., cat, brat, at) are read faster than items with fewer body neighbours. This body-N effect has been explored in the context of cross-linguistic differences in reading where it has been reported that the size of the effect differs as a function of orthographic depth: readers of English, a deep orthography, show stronger facilitation than readers of German, a shallow orthography. Such findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory, which proposes that readers of English rely on large orthographic units to reduce ambiguity of print-to-speech correspondences in their orthography. Here we re-examine the evidence for this pattern and find that there is no reliable evidence for such a crosslinguistic difference. Re-analysis of a key study ), analysis of data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), and a large-scale analysis of nine new experiments all support this conclusion. Using Bayesian analysis techniques, we find little evidence of the body-N effect in most tasks and conditions. Where we do find evidence for a body-N effect (lexical decision for nonwords), we find evidence against an interaction with language.

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“…Deep orthographies have complex mappings (e.g., standard writing conventions for English, Mandarin Chinese and Hebrew), while shallow orthographies more closely approximate the ideal one-to-one mapping (Korean Hangul, Japanese Kana, Spanish alphabet). The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis holds that shallower orthographies will be easier to learn due to their more consistent mappings from grapheme to linguistic unit, and that in such writing systems phonology will play a more prominent role in lexical access than will be the case for deeper orthographies (Frost et al, 1987;Frost & Katz, 1989;Katz & Frost, 1992;Rao et al, 2011;Schmalz et al, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

Orthography, Word Recognition, and Reading

Braze

Gong

2017

The Handbook of Psycholinguistics

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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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Getting to the bottom of orthographic depth

Cited by 139 publications

References 95 publications

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

German and English Bodies: No Evidence for Cross-Linguistic Differences in Preferred Orthographic Grain Size

Orthography, Word Recognition, and Reading

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