The developmental dyslexia studies in alphabetic languages usually from the perspectives of cognition, neurobiology and genetics. Since the Chinese language is characterized as a logographic writing system with deep orthography, which is different from alphabetic languages, whether the findings in alphabetic languages are coincident in Chinese remains a question. By comparing theories in the ca...

In alphabetic writing systems, saccade amplitude (a close correlate of reading speed) is independent of font size, presumably because an increase in the angular size of letters is compensated for by a decrease of visual acuity with eccentricity. We propose that this invariance may (also) be due to the presence of spaces between words, guiding the eyes across a large range of font sizes. Here, w...

Bilingual reading can require more than knowing two languages. Learners must acquire also the writing conventions of their second language, which can differ in its deep mapping principles (writing system) and its visual configurations (script). We review ERP (event-related potential) and fMRI studies of both Chinese–English bilingualism and Chinese second language learning that bear on the syst...

The alphabet effect that showed that codified law, alphabetic writing, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic are interlinked, first proposed by McLuhan and Logan (1977), is revisited. Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s (1988) insight that alphabetic writing led to the separation of figure and ground and their interplay, as well as the emergence of visual space, are reviewed and shown to be ...

There has been mounting concern among social scientists that conclusions from studies conducted on highly educated populations from affluent European cultures may have limited applicability to human behavior in general (Henrich et al., 2010). Similar reservations have also been voiced in the fields of language (Evans and Levinson, 2009) and literacy (Share, 2008a; Frost, 2012). Reading research...

In one of the many and fundamental side-remarks made by Turing in his 1950 paper (The Imitation Game paper), an analogy is made between Mechanism and Writing. Turing is aware that his Machine is a writing/re-writing mechanism, but he doesn’t go deeper into the comparison. Striding along the history of writing, we will hint here at the nature and the role of alphabetic writing in the invention o...

Understanding how the mappings between orthography and phonology in alphabetic languages are learned, represented and processed has been enhanced by the cognitive neuropsychological investigation of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders. During the past decade, this methodology has been extended to understanding reading and writing in Chinese leading to new insights about languag...

This paper presents a semi-automatic method to derive morphological analyzers from a limited number of example inflections suitable for languages with alphabetic writing systems. The system we present learns the inflectional behavior of morphological paradigms from examples and converts the learned paradigms into a finite-state transducer that is able to map inflected forms of previously unseen...

This paper documents and analyzes several Dongba script notes collected during my interviews with the Ruke priests. It provides an overview of glyphs in processing daily vocabulary International Phonetic Alphabet. compares these pictographs Geba script, syllabic writing system Naxi people, as well various types scripts used by some other ethnic groups, which show a general tendency Romanization...

We introduce the problem of explicit modeling of form relationships between words in different languages, focusing here on languages having an alphabetic writing system and affixal morphology. We present an algorithm that learns the cross-language correspondence between affixes and letter sequences. The algorithm does not assume prior knowledge of affixes in any of the languages, using only a s...