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Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: a multilingual comparison
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
|February 1, 1987
Summary
The psychological reality of orthographical depth significantly impacts visual word recognition. Deeper orthographies like Hebrew show stronger effects of word properties on naming compared to shallow ones like Serbo-Croatian.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Orthographical depth refers to the consistency between spelling and pronunciation.
- Variations in orthographical depth across languages may influence visual word recognition processes.
- Previous research has explored orthographical depth but cross-linguistic comparisons using identical methods are limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the psychological reality of orthographical depth.
- To examine how orthographical depth influences visual word recognition.
- To compare naming performance across languages with varying orthographical depths: Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian.
Main Methods:
- Conducted three sets of naming experiments using native speakers and identical methodologies in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian.
- Manipulated lexical status of stimuli (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, nonwords).
- Assessed semantic priming effects and the impact of nonlexical tokens on word naming.
Main Results:
- Lexical status significantly affected naming in Hebrew (deep orthography), moderately in English, and not at all in Serbo-Croatian (shallow orthography).
- Semantic priming effects were larger in Hebrew than English and absent in Serbo-Croatian.
- A high proportion of nonwords affected word naming in Hebrew and English but not Serbo-Croatian.
Conclusions:
- Results strongly support the orthographical depth hypothesis.
- Suggest that shallow orthographies involve direct print-to-phonology conversion, while deep orthographies rely on the internal lexicon.