Reading different writing systems: The grapholinguistic equilibrium hypothesis

1. Reading different writing systems:The grapholinguistic equilibrium hypothesis Mark S. Seidenberg University of Wisconsin-Madison

3. Golden era for reading research! Not just English; many writing systems, languages Lots of progress! One of the big success stories in cognitive science/neuroscience (links to education: not so good, at least in US)

4. My own work Connectionist models that simulate detailed aspects of acquisition, skilled performance. Dyslexia = anomalies in how system develops Children, adults Normal, dyslexic English, Serbian, Chinese, other writing systems Research at UW, Medical College of Wisconsin, Haskins Labs (CT) Brain circuits Computational models Behavior

5. For today’s talk, I tried to pick a topic that is of interest to this audience

6. Writing Systems and Reading • Do properties of writing systems affect • Skilled reading • Learning to read • Brain circuits that support reading • Dyslexia

7. context meaning spelling sound We have this framework…. • Mappings between codes are statistical, not categorical 2. Ouput determined by multiple constraints • Division of labor among components varies between writing systems between individuals

9. Other models? There are some. Not the time or place to do comparisons. But, DRC Doesn’t Read Correctly And CDP+ Can’d Do Pronunciation, and other stuff Post-hoc fitting of models to data. Only allows models to fit individual studies of a phenomenon, sort of. “incremental, nested”? No, not actually.

10. But that’s a different talk

11. Impact of writing systems: an area where dual-route models have little to say • Fitting models to writing systems/languages • Each gets a different model, different parameters • Similarities/differences built in: have to know them already • No learning • No semantics • No “why”

12. But that’s a different talk

13. It’s a golden era for reading research but it’s taken a while for cross-linguistic issues to come into focus Most research: it’s about the properties of writing systems Orthographic depth I don’t think this is quite right. It’s about writing systems and the languages they represent

14. There are tradeoffs between writing systems and languages There is Grapholinguistic Equilibrium

15. Confidential: I don’t actually know how every writing system in the world works. For example, I don’t know český jazyk Grapholinguistic Equilibrium is a hypothesis. Most of the evidence is circumstantial. Not much direct experimental evidence.

16. Let’s do an experiment here! Now! When you hear this Ask: is it true of český jazyk? If it is, great. If it isn’t, I’ll go

17. semantics orthography phonology So: Writing affords routes to meaning! ALL writing

18. Whether your word is PICTURE or obrázek or

19. An early division of labor theory: Orthographic Depth

20. semantics orthography phonology Orthographic depth hypothesis: shallow: more orth-phon-sem deep: more orth-sem English: both 1980s Katz, Turvey, Haskins Labs

21. Among alphabetic writing systems, English is unusual many inconsistencies unlike Finnish, Italian, Russian, Korean, Czech others orth-->phon is a big issue for English learners not for everyone else

22. We don’t want theories of reading to be based on the outlier data!

23. It’s true that written English differs from shallower alphabetic systems Assumptions derived from English may not be valid. Findings differ in important respects. But, there are no “outlier” orthographies. Just: Different tradeoffs between writing systems and languages

24. Is English an outlier? For example, Learning to read: are shallow orthographies easier?

25. Case study: Welsh vs. English • Welsh: shallow English: deep • Different schools, same communities • Natural controls for SES etc. (These are older studies, Marketa.)

26. Spencer & Hanley, 2003: 6 year olds Out of 30 items/ condition Ellis & Hooper, 2001: Welsh-reading 7 year olds correctly name twice as many words as English readers

27. Similar findings in other languages Italian Spanish German French Finnish Serbian Turkish Albanian others Handbook of Orthography and Literacy, Joshi & Aron (Eds.), Erlbaum 2006 Seymour et al. (2003) Ziegler et al. (2010) Czech?

28. Issue: These studies equate “reading” with “reading aloud” Question: What is the relationship between reading aloud and comprehension? Not tested or not tested in detail.

29. The word “comprehension” does not occur in this article. Why not?

30. Many studies of English show that learning orth-phon is hard Reading aloud is related to comprehension skill • 2. Therefore, writing systems that make it easier to learn orth-phon should be easier to learn to read = comprehend Case where thinking was too tied to studies of English.

31. But Reading Aloud ≠ Reading I shall demonstrate…

32. 1. Dissociations of reading aloud and comprehension Good reading aloud Zero comprehension

33. Bar Mitzvah Languages For the Bar/Bat Mitzvah, the boy/girl • Must be able to read Hebrew aloud • Do not have to comprehend • Can be done if the writing system is shallow • Which vowelled Hebrew is. Welsh: also a very good Bar Mitzvah language!

34. Do Shallow OrthographiesPromote Better Comprehension? Not in the Welsh-English studies Ellis and Hooper Pronunciation Welsh > English Comprehension English > Welsh* Hanley et al. Comprehension English > Welsh Correlation between pronunciation, comprehension: English highly significant Welsh n.s.

35. “This result suggests that a transparent orthography does not confer any advantages as far as reading comprehension is concerned. As comprehension is clearly the goal of reading this finding is potentially reassuring for teachers of English.” Hanley et al. 2004

36. What about other Bar Mitzvah Languages? Turkish: Aydin Durgunoğlu has looked at both reading aloud and comprehension in detail “Phonological awareness and decoding develop rapidly in both young and adult readers of Turkish because of the transparent orthography and the special characteristics of phonology and morphology. However, reading comprehension is still a problem.” Durgunoğlu, 2006

37. Also true of other shallow orthographies? Czech?

38. 2. People comprehend words they cannot pronounce correctly English speakers all have (or had) words of this sort in our vocabularies.

39. Egregious Piquant Suave Rapport Quay Non-pareil Automata Chaos Coitus “URINE-OUS?” URANUS

40. If we tested my reading aloud, I might perform more poorly than Welsh readers too.

41. 3. How shallow are shallow orthographies? Writing systems are not transcriptions of speech. Information relevant to pronunciation is left out. Creates limit on strictly orth-phon-sem processing.

42. Example: Serbo-Croatian, the original “shallow” orthography Grapheme-phoneme correspondences easy, but not sufficient Pronunciation requires more syllabic stress: pitch accent: ZATvori prisons RIBA fish vs. to scrub zatVORi to shut LUK onion vs. arch PROIZvodi products proizVODi to produce A lot like English! CONduct conDUCT

43. Czech?

44. 4. What prevents people from learning orth-->sem? Even in shallow orthographies? Harm & Seidenberg (2004) division of labor model learned Orth-phon-sem Orth-sem At the same time. Maybe people do too.

45. It’s shallow all right… … but they leave out the vowels! 5. If shallow is so GREAT, what about Hebrew?

46. 6. And what about the spoken language? • Writing systems differ • So do the languages they represent Comprehension depends on both! Gough, Simple view of reading Decoding X Spoken language comprehension

47. Orthographic depth Morphological complexity DEEPER SHALLOWER Morphologically simple Morphologically complex English, Chinese Finnish, Serbian, Italian, Russian Albanian, Welsh, Spanish, etc. Czech?

48. Why would this relation hold, in general?

49. Consider Serbo-Croatian • They get the spelling-sound correspondences for free • But the morphology is very complex! 3 genders 2 numbers 7 cases masc sing nominative fem plural genitive neuter dative accusative instrumental locative vocative Czech

50. Mirkovic, Seidenberg, Joanisse (Cognitive Science, 2011) Model of learning Serbian inflectional system