Quantitative Linguistics 1 , 3 , 178 - 188 , 1994 Measuring the complexity of writing systemsAntal

We propose a quantitative operationalisation of the complexity of a writing system. This complexity, also referred to as orthographic depth, plays a crucial role in psycholinguistic modelling of reading aloud (and learning to read aloud) in several languages. The complexity of a writing system is expressed by two measures, viz. that of the complexity of letter{phoneme alignment and that of the complexity of grapheme{phoneme correspondences. We present the alignment problem and the correspondence problem as tasks to three different data-oriented learning algorithms, and submit them to English, French and Dutch learning and testing material. Generalisation performance metrics are used to propose for each corpus a two-dimensional writing system complexity value.