Learning artificial orthographies: further evidence of a nonanalytic acquisition procedure

Previous research (Byrne, 1984) showed that adults who learned to read an orthography representing phonetic features (voicing, place of articulation) did not readily obtain usable knowledge of the mapping of phonetic features onto orthographic elements, as evidenced by failure to generalize to partially new stimuli. The present Experiment 1 used a different method of detecting learning savings during acquisition. Subjects learned a set of complex symbols standing for phones, with the elements representing voicing and place. In a second acquisition set, the signs for voicing were reversed. Learning speed was not affected, which was consistent with the claim that feature-element links went unnoticed in initial acquisition. In Experiment 2, some subjects were instructed to "find the rule" embodied in the orthography. None did, and acquisition rates were no different from those of uninstructed subjects. In Experiment 3, subjects had 4 h of training on the orthography, with consistent feature-symbol mapping for half of the subjects and arbitrary pairings for the remainder. No reaction time advantage emerged in the consistent condition, which is further evidence of nonanalytic acquisition. The results are related to data from children learning to read.