This paper explores the relative contributions made by orthography, syllabic segment, and lexical tone in the word recognition and retrieval process. It also challenges recent assumptions regarding the role of orthography and tones in mental lexicon architecture. Using an implicit priming paradigm, a word recognition experiment was conducted with native speakers of two tonal languages, Chinese ...

Most models of reading aloud have been constructed to explain data in relatively complex orthographies like English and French. Here, we created an Italian version of the Connectionist Dual Process Model of Reading Aloud (CDP++) to examine the extent to which the model could predict data in a language which has relatively simple orthography-phonology relationships but is relatively complex at a...

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally expose...

This paper elaborates on Persian and English orthographic shared aspects to study the effects of L1 Persian on learning English as a foreign language. While there are some examples of letter and sound mismatches in the orthographic system of both languages, those of English are more complex than Persian. In order to see the effect of the mismatch between orthography and transcription, 40 Persia...

The notion of a "Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure" (BOSS) (Taft, 1979a) was examined in the phonologically shallow orthography of Serbo-Croatian, which is a highly inflected language written in two alphabets--Roman and Cyrillic. Some characters are shared by both alphabets and retain the same pronunciation in each, some are unique to one alphabet, and some are ambiguous, i.e., receive diff...

A recent debate in the language production literature concerns the influence of a word's orthographic information on spoken word production and the extent to which this influence is modulated by task context. In the present study, Mandarin Chinese participants produced sets of words that shared orthography (O+P-), phonology (O-P+), or orthography and phonology (O+P+), or were unrelated (O-P-), ...

This paper discusses the reconstruction of the Elamite language’s phonology from its orthography using the Gradual Learning Algorithm, which was re-purposed to “learn” underlying phonological forms from surface orthography. Practical issues are raised regarding the difficulty of mapping between orthography and phonology, and Optimality Theory’s neglected Lexicon Optimization module is highlighted.

This paper reports a case study of acquired surface alexia in Spanish and discusses the most suitable tests to detect this syndrome in a writing system that is very regular for reading at the segmental and supra-segmental levels. Patient MM has surface alexia characterized by quantitatively good performance in reading words and pseudowords; accurate but slow and syllabic reading of words, nonwo...

The recognition of dyslexia as a neurodevelopmental disorder has been hampered by the belief that it is not a specific diagnostic entity because it has variable and culture-specific manifestations. In line with this belief, we found that Italian dyslexics, using a shallow orthography which facilitates reading, performed better on reading tasks than did English and French dyslexics. However, all...