Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison.

Abstract

We investigated the psychological reality ofthe concept of orthographical depth and its influence on visual word recognition by examining naming performance in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian. We ran three sr of experiments in which we used native speakers and identical experimental methods in each language. Experiment 1 revealed that the lexical status ofthe stimulus (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords) significantly affected naming in Hebrew (the deepest of the three orthographies). This effect was only moderate in English and nonsignificant in Serbo-Croatian (the shallowest of the three orthographies). Moreover, only in Hebrew did lexical status have similar effects on naming and lexical decision performance. Experiment 2 revealed that semantic priming effects in naming were larger in Hebrew than in English and completely absent in Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 3 revealed that a large proportion of nonlexical tokens (nonwords) in the stimulus list affects naming words in Hebrew and in English, but not in Serbo-Croatian. These resuits were interpreted as strong support for the orthographical depth hypothesis and suggest, in general, that in shallow orthographies phonology is generated dirr from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is derived from the internal lexicon.of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memo~ and Cognition, 8,[385][386][387][388][389][390][391][392][393][394][395][396][397][398][399]

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…The concept of orthographic depth distinguishes alphabetic orthographies according to the complexity of their lettersound correspondences (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987). In a shallow orthography, a direct 1:1 relation exists between spoken sounds and the graphemes that represent those sounds, whereas, in a deep orthography, the relation between spoken and written language is more opaque.…”

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

“…For instance, semantic priming affects processing at the level of whole words but not sub-lexical processing, and therefore, briefly exposed semantic primes are effective in deep orthographies, but have little or no effect on shallow orthographies. Thus, studies on Serbo-Croatian found no effect of semantic primes on word naming (Frost et al, 1987), whereas Hebrew word naming was significantly facilitated by semantic primes (Bentin & Feldman, 1990;Frost et al, 1987).…”

“…Such findings led to the view that readers of shallow orthographies like SerboCroatian or Italian rely extensively on a phonological assembly route, whereas readers of deep orthographies, such as unvoweled Arabic and Hebrew, predominantly use a direct access route in word recognition (Frost et al, 1987;Roman & Pavard, 1987;Tabossi & Laghi, 1992). That is to say, the faithful representation of word phonology in spelling encourages readers of shallow orthographies to convert spelling to sound, which then provides access to meaning.…”

“…The choice of route may, in turn, be influenced by the relative grapheme-to-phoneme transparency (or shallowness) of a writing system, as proposed in the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis or ODH (Frost, Katz, & Bentin 1987). Lukatela, Popadić, Ognjenović, and Turvey (1980) showed that readers of SerboCroatian (written in Roman and Cyrillic, with both orthographies being highly transparent) were slower at making lexical decisions to words comprised of phonologically ambiguous letters.…”

Spelling Development among Triangle versus Native Bedouin Arabic Pupils

“…For example, it was found that reaction times for visual recognition of Arabic words by senior high school native Arabic skilled readers were longer than reaction times for Hebrew words by native Hebrew high school seniors (Bentin & Ibrahim, 1996), English words by native English undergraduates, and Serbo-Croatian words by native Serbo-Croatians undergraduates (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987). It was also found that letter recognition process is faster and more accurate in Hebrew (L2) than in Arabic (L1) among bilingual native Arabic adults (Abu Rabia, 2001).…”