The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis: 25 Years Later M. T. Turvey University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories

The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Mattingly and colleagues, 1980) Shallow Orthography Phonetic Form Deep Orthography Phonetic Form Part II: Remoteness of orthography from phonetic form Morphophonological ‘like’ phonetic Morphophonological ‘unlike’ phonetic Reader needs little phonology Reader needs lots of phonology Part I: Lexical representation of written words Linguistic (not visual) Morphophonological (not phonetic)

Reaction Time about 7/10 second Reaction Time about 6/10 second ‘Deep’ Lexical Decision (“Is this a word?”) Yes! No! “YES” RT: HAVE (phonologically irregular) = MUST (phonologically regular) “NO” RT: MAVE (phonologically irregular) >> FUST (phonologically regular) Coltheart et al., 1979

Dual Route Theory O RTHOGRAPHY Phonology Lexicon WORD Routinely Occasionally (e.g., nonwords, rare words) In a deep orthography, perhaps, the reader avoids the “lots of phonology”. Lexical access is routinely visual.

Cyrillic common ambiguous A E O J T K M Roman R V S N B CH P C C D D F G I L Lj Nj Dz S U Z Z Vuk Karadzic ´ ˇ “Write as you speak and read as it is written” Bialphabetic Readers of a Shallow Orthography

English Lexical Decision Serbo-Croatian Lexical Decision with Fluent Bialphabetic readers HAVEMUST RT MAVEFUST RT “Unequivocal evidence for phonological code would be demonstration of its use in YES RT.” BETAPVETAR RT BEMAPVEMAR RT YES RT: Phonemically ambiguous BETAP >> phonemically unique VETAR NO RT: phonemically ambiguous BEMAP >> phonemically unique VEMAR Lukatela at al. 1978, 1980

Serbo-Croatian Orthography Phonetic Form English Orthography Phonetic Form Hebrew Orthography Phonetic Form Frost, Katz, and Bentin (1987) Hypothesis More shallow means smaller lexical role in naming relative to lexical decision OR Magnitude of [Lexical Decision RT - Naming RT] decreases with depth RT LD N RT LD N RT LD N

Similar Dissimilar Phonemic Relation Latency (ms) W-W PW-W W-PW PW-PW Can Naming a ‘Shallow’ Serbo-Croatian Letter String Benefit from a Visually Dissimilar but Phonemically Similar Prime? (Lukatela & Turvey, 1990; Lukatela et al., 1990) Effect of Phonemic Similarity is Indifferent to Lexical Composition of Prime-Target Sequence and to Visual Similarity. Prime and Target Differ in Alphabet, Differ in Case

***** AUTOMAT ***** appropriate W prime: ROBOT ambiguous PW prime: POBOT unique PW prime: RO OT F b In ‘Shallow’ Serbo-Croatian can (Phonologically Unique) Nonwords Activate Semantics Better than (Phonologically Ambiguous) Words? SOA (ms) Degree of Priming (ms) or ROBOT F RO OT

Deep Dual Route Theory WORD Orthography Phonology Lexicon WORD Orthography Phonology Lexicon Shallow Dual Route Theory WORD Orthography Phonology Semantics Phonological Coherence Theory

Reaction Time “frog” 1st mask 2nd prime 3rd mask 4th target Reaction Time “frog” 1st mask 2nd prime 3rd mask 4th target Masked Semantic Priming of Naming in ‘Deep’ English TODE-frog RT < TODR-frog RT

Reaction Time 1st mask 2nd prime 3rd mask 4th target Yes! Phonological Ambiguity Affects Identity Priming in English BEND-bend priming occurs at shorter time scales than BOWL-bowl priming Reaction Time 1st mask 2nd prime 3rd mask 4th target Yes!

Orthographic Depth: Remoteness of Orthography from Phonetic Form Shallow Orthography Phonetic Form Deep Orthography Phonetic Form Morphophonological ‘like’ phonetic Morphophonological ‘unlike’ phonetic Reader needs little phonology Reader needs lots of phonology Then: Orthographic Depth contributes to the formation of two different processing devices, one rule-based, one word-specific Now: Orthographic Depth modulates a single (connectionist) device. Processing differences more quantitative than qualitative. Phonology is significant in reading via deep and shallow orthographies.

The Very Deep Unpointed Hebrew Frost (1995) High Ambiguity: KBLN (“contractor”) read as /kablan/ Low Ambiguity: NZIR (“monk”) read as /nazir/ Naming Lexically Unequivocal Words that Differ in Phonological Ambiguity (in respect to ‘filling in’ missing vowels) KBLNNZIR RT “Phonology is always assembled and always lexically shaped, but not holistically addressed.”