Effects of phonological ambiguity on beginning readers of Serbo-Croatian

Third- and fifth-grade Yugoslavian children rapidly named familiar words and unfamiliar pseudowords that were written either in the Roman alphabet or in the Cyrillic alphabet and that were either phonologically ambiguous or not. Phonological ambiguity was produced by using letter strings that, when transcribed in Roman or when transcribed in Cyrillic, contained one or more ambiguous characters. Ambiguous characters are those letters shared by the two alphabets that receive different phonemic interpretations in the two alphabets. The controls for phonologically ambiguous words were the same words in their alternative, nonambiguous alphabetic transcription. Consistent with previous experiments on adults, the phonologically ambiguous form of a word or pseudoword was named much more slowly than the phonologically unambiguous form. For children who were equally proficient in both Roman and Cyrillic, the effect of phonological ambiguity was greater as children named letter strings faster. If it can be assumed that reading fluency correlates with naming latency, then it can be argued that the better beginning reader is more phonologically analytic.