Lexical decision in a phonologically shallow orthography.

o The Serbo-Croatian language is written in two alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic. Both orthographies transcribe the sounds of the language in a regular and straightforward fashion and may, therefore , be referred to as phonologically shallow in contrast to Engl orthography, which is phonologically deep 0 Most of the alphabet characters are unique to one alphabet or the other. There are, however, a number of shared characters, some of which receive the same reading and some of which receive a different reading, in the two alphabets. It is possible, therefore, to construct a variety of types of letter strings. Some of these can be read in only one way and can be either a word or nonsense. Other letter strings can be pronounced one way if read as Roman and in a distinctively different way if read as Cyrillic and can be words in both alphabets-but different words; or they can be nonsense in both alphabets or nonsense in one alphabet and a word in the other. In a lexical decision task conducted with bialphabetical readers, it was shown that words that can be read in two different ways are accepted more slowly and with greater error than words that can be read only one way. It was concl uded that for the phonologicall y shallow wri ting systems of Serbo-Croatian, lex ical decision proceeds with reference to the phonology. A case can be made for distinguishing among alphabetic writing systems in terms of the derivational complex that relates the spelling to the underl phonological form (Liberman, Liberman, Mattingly & Shankweiler, 1980) • English orthography is the notorious example of a "phonologically deep" system; but it is a truly phonographic orthography in spite of its depth because each spelled Engl ish word contains strong hints as to its pronunciation Nevertheless, the opaqueness of the link between English script and phonology is seen by many as a barrier to phonological involvement The argument runs as follows Given the difficulty of deriving the phonology, readers of English would be considerably better off if they had the option of bypassing the phonology and of relating to their alphabetic orthography much in the same way that the readers of Chinese, say, are thought to relate to their that is, of proceeding directly from script to