Measuring orthographic transparency and morphological-syllabic complexity in alphabetic orthographies: a narrative review

Abstract

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn’t received much attention so far. This paper therefore reviews metrics proposed in the literature for quantifying orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, and morphological complexity of alphabetic languages. The review included searches of Web of Science, PubMed, PsychInfo, Google Scholar, and various online sources. Search terms pertained to orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in relation to reading acquisition, and dyslexia. Although the predictive value of these metrics is promising, more research is needed to validate the value of the metrics discussed and to understand the ‘developmental footprint’ of orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in the lexical organization and processing strategies.

Cracking the Code: The Impact of Orthographic Transparency and Morphological-Syllabic Complexity on Reading and Developmental Dyslexia

“…For future research, we would suggest that more cross-linguistic studies be conducted comparing two orthographies which are similar on as many aspects as possible, but different with regard to orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, or morphological complexity. The quantitative indices discussed in Borleffs et al (2017) to measure differences between alphabetic languages may provide a starting point to compare languages on the specific aspect studied. Moreover, the proposed results will need to be corroborated by behavioral data of reading acquisition and skilled reading to validate their value in the study of reading development and dyslexia.…”

“…Furthermore, like us, many researchers question whether these differences indeed affect the development and expression of dyslexia, and if so, in what way. Recently, Borleffs et al (2017) published a paper discussing quantitative metrics measuring differences between alphabetic languages in orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity. According to the authors, more research is needed to understand the ‘developmental footprint’ of these variables in the lexical organization and processing strategies being developed for reading.…”

Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish

“…In the case of the brevity law for words, in Catalan and Spanish, the mathematical formulation derived from information theory and optimal coding [ 31 ] recently developed [ 4 ] is fully verified, and the law holds quantitatively. In a recent work [ 31 ] it has been established that optimal non-singular coding predicts that the length of linguistic elements should grow approximately as the logarithm of its frequency rank, which is consistent with Zipf’s law of abbreviation and our approach [ 4 ], but more work is needed to certify any optimality ranking between languages.Future work shall also extend this analysis to other languages (ideally from different linguistic families beyond the Indo–European) one and/or with different writing systems, and would also explore the connection between the brevity exponents and other complexity metrics of language or the so-called orthographic transparency, defined as the more or less direct relationship in the conversion between graphemes and phonemes for each language [ 52 ].…”

Reading Strategies of Romanian Readers with Dyslexia in Upper Primary Grades

“…One linguistic factor that could play an important role in differences as far as learning to read is concerned, and in the manifestation of reading difficulties is the syllabic complexity (Seymour, Aro, Erskine 2003, p. 145;Davies, Cueto, Glez-Seijaz 2007, p. 180). Syllabic complexity of a language predicts the easiness with which a beginner will gain access to the phonological structure of the language (Borleffs et al 2017(Borleffs et al , p. 1619, as a basis for establishing the correspondence between a phoneme and grapheme. More open structures are more easily segmented into smaller units of which the learner becomes aware.…”