Phonology-independent general orthographic knowledge

Statistical Knowledge and Learning in Phonology

Title of dissertation: STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN PHONOLOGY Ewan Michael Dunbar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor William Idsardi Department of Linguistics This dissertation deals with the theory of the phonetic component of grammar in a formal probabilistic inference framework: (1) it has been recognized since the beginning of generative phonology that ...

Orthographic Knowledge 1 an Investigation into the Structure and Acquisition of Orthographic Knowledge: Evidence from Cross-script Kanji-hiragana Priming

Numerous studies have demonstrated that orthographic knowledge is coded in an abstract format in English (e.g., the perceptually dissimilar words READ/read map onto a common abstract orthographic representation). However, it is unclear at present whether this mapping occurs at the letter or word level. Two experiments investigate this issue in a language (i.e., Japanese) where words can be writ...

Effects of Phonology and Morphology in Children’s Orthographic Systems: A Crosslinguistic Study of Hebrew and Dutch

Non-automaticity of use of orthographic knowledge in phoneme evaluation

Two phoneme goodness rating experiments addressed the role of orthographic knowledge in the evaluation of speech sounds. Ratings for the best tokens of /s/ were higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words where /s/ was spelled with C (e.g., voice). This difference did not appear for analogous nonwords for which every lexical neighbour had either S or C spelling (pless, floice). M...

Developmental Relations between Reading Ability and Knowledge of Orthographic Structure

First, second, and third grade readers were asked to pick the item that “looked more like a word” from a pair of letter strings. The items to be discriminated differed in terms of a rule-governed description of orthographic structure. Task performance improved with school experience, averaging 58, 69, and 79% correct for first, second, and third grade readers, respectively. More importantly, re...